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THE FUTURE LIFE 
IN THE LIGHT OF 
MODERN INQUIRY 



BY 
REV. SAMUEL McCOMB 

Co-author of " Religion and Medicine" 
Author of " Prayers for To-day," etc. 




NEW YORK 

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 

1919 



BTT3U 



Copyright, 1919, by 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc. 



OCT 28 1919 



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Qftt <©utnn & IBotitn Company 

BOOK MANUFACTURERS 
RAHWAY NEW JERSEY 



©CU536349 



<Vv% § 



To 

My Mother 
In Grateful Memory and Sacred Hvpe 



PKEFATORY NOTE 

The author offers no apology for the publica- 
tion of this book. The subject is indeed well- 
worn, and there is much plausibility in the 
aphorism that "nothing new has been said for 
immortality since Plato, and nothing new 
against it since Epicurus. ' ' Yet this is not to be 
taken too literally. Our newer knowledge has 
deprived many ancient arguments of the pres- 
tige which they once enjoyed, and has, at the 
same time, opened up fresh paths of reflection 
and suggested the lines along which the thoughts 
of coming generations are likely to run. More- 
over, the world in our day is shaking and the 
hearts of men are failing them for fear. Every- 
one is bound to say what he can on behalf of a 
belief that cannot but steady and reassure the 
human soul amid the perils that now beset it. 
Cordial thanks are due and are hereby ten- 
dered to Dr. Walter F. Prince for his gener- 
osity in preparing the materials of Chapter IX, 
especially for his clear outline of the Fisher 
case, a fuller exposition of which he will set 
forth in a volume now being made ready for the 

vii 



viii PEEFATOEY NOTE 

press. Grateful acknowledgment must also be 
made of Eev. Dr. Elwood Worcester's kindness 
in reading a portion of the proofs and in making 
several valuable suggestions. Chapter IV has 
already appeared as an article in the Contempo- 
rary Review for June, 1919, and in the Ameri- 
can Journal of Psychical Research for the same 
month. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. What is Immortality? 1 

II. Immortality and the Modern Man 13 

III. The Desire for Immortality . 39 

IV. Hindrances to Belief in Immor- 

tality . . , . . . 55 

V. The Moral Argument ... 83 

VI. Jesus Christ and the Future 

Life . . . . . .100 

VII. Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? . 120 

VIII. The Argument from Psychical 

Eesearch 140 

IX. Specimens of the Evidence Sup- 
plied by Psychical Eesearch . 166 

X. The Practical Value of Belief 

in Immortality .... 218 



THE FUTUEE LIFE IN THE LIGHT 
OF MODERN INQUIRY 



THE FUTURE LIFE IN THE LIGHT 
OF MODERN INQUIRY 

CHAPTER I 

WHAT IS IMMORTALITY? 

It is important at the outset to make clear the 
sense in which our terms are used. The 
pantheist, the positivist, and even the agnostic 
assert immortality no less fervently than the 
orthodox Christian, but it will be admitted that 
a conception so loose and featureless can hardly 
admit of argument. It is unfortunate that the 
word "immortality" has been used with such 
ambiguity that the problem has been obscured 
and a subject difficult enough in itself has been 
rendered still less amenable to thought. 

A widespread popular usage interprets im- 
mortality as in a strict sense the life everlasting. 
But whether the soul will last forever is and 
must remain always a question for faith. Here 
knowledge and science are dumb. We know not 
what vicissitudes may be in store for the soul in 

l 



2 THE FUTUKE LIFE 

the measureless reaches of infinite time. The 
survival of physical death might well raise the 
presumption or the hope that a being capable 
of surmounting such a barrier would also prove 
equal to any changes that may befall in the life 
to come. But beyond this we cannot go. 

By immortality is here meant the survival of 
bodily death of that part of man which is called, 
variously, mind, soul, self, spirit, individuality, 
personality, or whatever other term may be 
held to be synonymous with these. The time- 
honoured word "soul" is as good as any other 
— if only we are careful to make sure of what 
we mean by it. Modern men cannot away with 
the notion that the "soul" is a mysterious en- 
tity, distinct from, and, so to say, standing over 
against thoughts, volitions, and feelings, itself 
knowing no change, while these, like the ever- 
shifting pictures of a magic-lantern, come and 
go and never continue in one stay. The more 
we try to grasp this entity, the more it eludes 
us. It is a metaphysical abstraction for which 
we can find no meaning or purpose : and so the 
psychologist refuses to recognize it and is con- 
tent to leave it to the preacher and the scholastic 
philosopher. Today what we mean by the 
"soul" is simply a limited stream of thoughts, 
volitions, and feelings, partly conscious, partly 



WHAT IS IMMORTALITY? 3 

subconscious, yet also a stream able to recall 
its past states, and to recognize these states 
as its own. This finite unitary consciousness 
is connected with a body in a relationship in- 
describably intimate. But both the psychical 
and physical elements imply a greater reality 
to which they belong and out of which they 
have emerged. If any reader feels that this 
view makes the soul too much of a mere phe- 
nomenon, perhaps the definition of a well- 
known man of science will prove more helpful : 
"The soul is that controlling and guiding prin- 
ciple which is responsible for our personal ex- 
pression and for the construction of the body 
under the restrictions of physical condition 
and ancestry. In its higher development it 
includes also feeling and intelligence and will 
and is the storehouse of mental experience. 
The body is its instrument or organ, enabling 
it to conceive and to convey physical impres- 
sions, and to affect and be affected by matter 
and energy. When the body is destroyed, there- 
fore, the soul disappears from physical ken; 
when the body is impaired, its function is inter- 
fered with and the soul's physical reaction be- 
comes feeble and unsatisfactory. Thus has 
arisen the popular misconception that the soul 
of a slain person or of a cripple or paralytic, 



4 THE FUTURE LIFE 

has been destroyed or damaged; whereas only 
its instrument of manifestation need have 
been affected. The kind of evils which really 
assault and hurt the soul belong to a different 
category." 1 

It really does not matter, so far as the prob- 
lem of immortality is concerned, how we define 
the soul, if only we refuse to reduce it to a func- 
tion or a by-product of brain-processes. Our 
idea of the nature of the future life will in- 
deed be affected by our conception of the 
spiritual content of the soul, but the fact 
of the future life is independent of all such 
theories. 

Now, the question in which we are interested 
today is not, Is the soul endlessly existent? but, 
Does the soul survive the experience of death 
and preserve a sense of its identity? If and 
when we are able to answer this question in the 
affirmative, we may go on to enquire as to the 
nature and we may even speculate as to the 
conditions of the life beyond. The point to be 
emphasized just now T is that immortality means 
the individual's survival of death, the per- 
sistence of personal consciousness in spite of 
physical dissolution. 

Many who are unable to believe in this con- 

1 Sir Oliver Lodge: Mem <md the Universe, pp. 165, 166. 



WHAT IS IMMORTALITY? 5 

quest over death, cannot bear the thought that 
all the garnered treasures of human character 
are thrown to the dust heap, and hold that the 
moral and spiritual values attributed to the sur- 
vival of personality can be retained and con- 
verted into an ethical inspiration by the posthu- 
mous working of our influence in the lives and 
characters of unborn generations. The solidar- 
ity of the race is indeed a truth which science 
has especially graven on the minds of modern 
men. No man stands alone. No life is lived unto 
itself alone. We are one with our environment. 
Our deepest convictions are shaped in part at 
least by men and women who have long since 
mouldered in their graves. And we, in turn, by 
our words and deeds, affect our contemporaries 
and shall affect those who come after us, for 
good or ill, for happiness or misery. It is, in- 
deed, a solemn thought that every act we do 
leaves its mark upon the texture of our spiritual 
nature, and at the same time goes forth to 
work out its appointed consequences in the life 
of humanity. Our little lives like rivulets rush 
to swell the vast tide of the race's common 
life, each making its contribution to the mighty 
whole. All this is deeply, if tritely, true. In 
the oft-quoted lines of George Eliot, it has found 
noble expression: 



6 THE FUTURE LIFE 

"Oh may I join the choir invisible 
Of those immortal dead who live again 
In minds made better by their presence : live 
In pulses stirred to generosity, 
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn 
For miserable aims that end with self, 
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars 
And with their mild persistence urge man 's search 
To vaster issues." 

But the very efforts of poet and philosopher 
to array in alluring colours the hope of post- 
humous influence in the life of posterity as a 
substitute for personal continuance after death, 
are themselves proofs of the deep-seated long- 
ing which is denied. And the more we examine 
the proposed exchange the more we see that it 
is a case of giving us a stone when we ask for 
bread. For the assumption is that the history 
of the race is one of continuous and unmodified 
progress. But as Professor Eoyce has pointed 
out, temporal progress is only one aspect of the 
temporal order. "For in Nature, too, nothing 
recurs. The broken china will not mend. The 
withered flowers bloom no more. The sun parts 
forever with its heat. Tidal friction irrevocably 
retards the revolution of the earth/ ' And 
again : i i Remember w T e have lost, beyond earthly 
recall, the Greeks, and the constructive genius 



WHAT IS IMMORTALITY? 7 

of a Shakespeare or of a Goethe; and these are, 
indeed, for us mortals, simply irreparable loss." 
Thus progress and decay, evolution and disinte- 
gration, are alike laws that govern the history 
of the individual and the race. Not only so, but 
if any dictum of science is to be relied on, it is 
that which prophesies that "our racial destiny 
is to strive and to starve to death in ever- 
deepening gloom." In other w T ords, w r e are 
asked to devote our moral energies with w T hole- 
souled ardour to the work of helping a race 
which is as evanescent as a colony of ants, 
and of confining all our interests to a world 
which will one day roll on in its orbit as 
though men and ants had never been. Such 
a theory of immortality makes the sacrifice of 
the individual irrational and unjustifiable. The 
heroic millions who in the Great War have 
laid down their lives for freedom — what of 
them? Do you say that they have contributed 
their share to the progress of the world, that 
the good cause will triumph because of their 
sacrifice and that this is their reward? What 
matters it that they lapse into nothingness, if 
only the ultimate victory of right be achieved? 
The answer is, that our moral consciousness 
protests against such a decree. We ask and 
cannot but ask that somewhere and some time 



/ 



8 THE FUTURE LIFE 

these brave spirits shall witness and share in 
the triumph of that righteousness of which 
they were the organs and instruments. And 
here we return to the ever-present question 
of the worth of personality. Man, says Kan^ 
is an end in himself and cannot be used as st 
means to an end. But on the theory we are 
controverting, man is of no intrinsic account. 
All life, the living individuals of today, and of 
the farthest bounds of time, must appear, in this 
view, utterly contemptible. Why should I sacri- 
fice myself for others, if the others are, like 
myself, the children of a fleeting day, doomed 
to the same pitiful fate? It is no reproach to 
human nature to say that few will be found to 
rejoice in such a quixotic enterprise. The " im- 
mortal dead" were once indeed unique centres 
of experience, but they are now annihilated and 
while some of their thoughts may persist, they 
do not "live again," no more than the stone 
lives again (to borrow Huxley's illustration) in 
the wavelets which it makes when flung into the 
sea. 

More recently, poetic thought has sought to 
find a substitute for personal continuance after 
death in a mystic absorption in the totality of 
being, or God. William Watson conceives the 
great divine event awaiting humanity to be uni- 



WHAT IS IMMORTALITY? 9 

versal euthanasia — a reabsorption in the Uni- 
versal Spirit. 

"When from this threshold of being, these steps of 

the Present, this precinct, 
Into the matrix of life, darkly, divinely resumed, 
Man and his littleness perish, erased like an error 

and cancelled, 
Man and his greatness, lost in the greatness of 

God." 1 

Now, wherein consists man's real greatness? 
Is it not in the fact that he is the creator of 
character, a unique self-conscious centre of feel- 
ing and will? This is the inner core of man's 
essence. It is this that differentiates him from 
the brute creation and constitutes him a person. 
For man so conceived to disappear or be lost 
"in the greatness of God" would mean a trag- 
edy, obscuring in gloom the divine character 
and the spiritual worth of man. What kind 
of a God must we suppose Him to be Who hav- 
ing called into being a creature such as man, 
endowed with individuality and all the unreal- 
ized possibilities of a divine nobleness, should 
waste all this spiritual treasure, the grandest 
product of creative energy, by quenching the 
light of conscious reason and affection in "the 

1 Hymn to the Sea. 



10 THE FUTURE LIFE 

vast darkness of the Godhead"? Francis 
Thompson's intuition pierces the sophism with 
unerring insight : 

" Ah ! is Thy love indeed 
A weed, albeit an amaranthine weed 
Suffering no flowers, except its own to mount?" 

Certainly the interests of ethics and religion 
are bound up with the denial of any renuncia- 
tion of man's true selfhood. His annihilation 
means a loss to the moral order, for the good 
realized in character ceases to be ; it means also 
a loss to God, for a being whom He has sum- 
moned into friendship with Himself is no more. 
In some real and true sense God needs man, 
even as man needs God. Every soul has to God 
the value of a realized purpose, an increase of 
goodness in the universe. But this conviction 
is fatal to the thought that a physical episode, 
such as death, can put a term to the love and 
self -giving which constitute the true greatness 
and glory of the Divine. 

There is another substitute for personal con- 
tinuance after death which some modern the- 
ologians offer us and which in much of present- 
day preaching obscures the real issue. Per- 
sonal immortality is left shadowed with doubt, 
but in order to make good this deficiency, strong 



WHAT IS IMMOETALITY? 11 

emphasis is laid on " eternal life." Many an 
unsuspecting hearer imagines that when "eter- 
nal life ' ' is held up before him as the true goal 
of all his strivings, he is being exhorted to live a 
life not limited by death but as permanent as the 
life of God Himself. What is meant, however, 
is quite irrelevant to the notion of personal per- 
sistence in a life beyond the grave. The phrase 
is intended to mark a quality of soul attainable 
here and now — a sense of dominion over the 
world, an experience of victory over the troubles 
and vexations of our earthly existence. It is 
a present ethical and religious experience and 
one may have it without thereby entertaining 
any hope for a life after death. Bailey in his 
"Festus" has brought out the thought: 



a 



We live in deeds not years, in thoughts not breaths, 
In feelings, not in figures on a dial. ' ' 

In its highest sense "eternal life" means fellow- 
ship with God evidenced in a life of brotherly 
love and service. As a New Testament writer 
puts it: "This is eternal life, that they know 
Thee, the only real God, and He Whom Thou 
hast sent." * "We know we have crossed from 
death to life, because we love the brotherhood ; 
and he who has no love [for his brother] 

1 John xvii, 3. 



12 THE FUTUEE LIFE 

remains in death." 1 So far, however, is this 
profound truth from being incompatible with 
the idea of personal immortality that it rather 
points beyond itself and suggests the ultimate 
victory of the soul over death, the swallowing 
up of all that threatens man's destiny, in an 
abounding and ever-growing life. We may well 
argue that if "eternal life" means the present 
consciousness of God, an episode in the history 
of the physical organism will not avail to quench 
this consciousness in darkness. 

1 1. John iii, 14 (Moffatt's translation). 



CHAPTER II 

IMMOBTALITY AND THE MODERN MAN 

There is, perhaps, no more significant revela- 
tion of the spiritual trend of our age than the 
revived interest in the riddle of human destiny. 
Even before the war, in many circles where it 
was supposed the question was settled for all 
intelligent persons in the negative, old question- 
ings began to stir afresh, and the discovery was 
made that the matter was not settled, that the 
human spirit was girding itself for a fresh 
attack on the ancient problem: If a man die 
shall he live again? But, undoubtedly, the war 
with its cruel losses has stirred in millions of 
hearts with unwonted poignancy the old crav- 
ings to know whether " those we call the dead 
are breathers of an ampler day," and whether 
there are grounds for believing that spirit will 
yet flash to spirit some signal of mutual recog- 
nition. Today as never before men and women 
are searching their minds to discover where 
they really stand in regard to this most vital 
and momentous question. Amid the crash of 
falling kingdoms, the passing away of those 

13 



14 THE FUTURE LIFE 

near to us and most dear, the darkening 
shadows of social revolution, in short, the utter 
insecurity of all finite interests, we ask for some 
enduring reality, some abiding rock on which 
we can build the fabric of our spiritual life. 
The experience of many soldiers at the front is 
that also of many of their friends who remained 
at home. Face to face with death, either per- 
sonally or vicariously, these persons have dis- 
covered that their religious faith or view of life 
was a mere tradition which broke down under 
the pressure of a terrible experience. They 
have awakened as from a pleasant dream, to 
discover — what ? A world full of doubt, denial, 
uncertainty, at best of vague and elusive hopes. 
There are many persons who w r ould describe 
their mental state as "an aspiration sometimes 
approaching almost to a faith, occasionally and 
for a few moments rising into a trust, but never 
able to settle into the consistency of a definite 
and enduring creed.' ' 

But whatever may be the situation in the 
world at large, surely inside our Christian 
Churches this faith is kept fresh and living, 
and here, if nowhere else, death can be faced in 
calmness and peace in the assured confidence 
that it marks only a transition to a fuller and 
a richer life. Alas I this is far from being the 



IMMORTALITY AND MODERN MAN 15 

case, as any one with knowledge of the facts 
can testify. Too often blank uncertainty ending 
in bitter despair unhinges the mind and throws 
the inner world into confusion. There are, of 
course, many exceptions, but these will be found 
almost wholly confined to the few who can ac- 
cept the Christian revelation in childlike faith 
or whose spiritual intuitions are undimmed by 
the shadows of the abstractive intellect. The 
refusal to accept any truth on authority, the rise 
and dominance of the higher criticism, the un- 
certain note of the educated teacher of religion, 
and the crude phantasies of the uneducated 
evangelist — all these and other influences in a 
lesser degree are responsible for the present 
failure of faith in immortality in the Christian 
world. Indeed it must be confessed with pain 
that the most unw r avering assurances of the 
immortal hope do not as a rule come from the 
professed champions of Church and Creed but 
from men whose main interests lie elsewhere. 
Take, for example, the following statement of a 
well-known man of science : "We shall certainly 
continue to exist, we shall certainly survive. 
Why do I say that? I say it on definite scien- 
tific grounds. I know that certain friends of 
mine still exist, because I have talked with them 
... I have conversed with them as I could, 



J 



-l 



16 THE FUTURE LIFE 

converse through a telephone with any one in 
this audience now. Being men of cultivated 
mind they have given proofs that it is really 
they, not some impersonation, not something 
emanating from myself. They have given defi- 
nite proofs. Some of these proofs have been 
published. Many more will have to be withheld 
for a time, but will ultimately be published. I 
tell you with all the strength of conviction that I 
can muster that the fact is so, that we do persist, 
that people still take an interest in what is going 
on, that they still help us, that they know far 
more about things than we do, that they are able 
from time to time to communicate. ' ' x Now what 
strikes the reader in this confession is not the 
reference to the spiritistic theory of communi- 
cation so much as the ringing tone of clear and 
assured conviction. However this certainty is 
gained, it is simply invaluable. It means a new 
world for the man who has won it. It can- 
not but bring to life an ethical stimulus, con- 
solation amid discouragement and defeat, a 
coherence and an intelligibility otherwise im- 
possible. Yet were one to stand up in a Chris- 
tian pulpit and proclaim a future life with a 
like assurance, he would be listened to with 
polite incredulity on the part of very many and 

1 Sir Oliver Lodge: Science and Religion, p. 25. 



IMMOETALITY AND MODERN MAN 17 

would find himself regarded as St. Paul was y 
by the Athenians — something of an enthusiast. 
Ruskin in his preface to "The Crown of Wild 
Olive" makes the strikingly true observation 
that "if you address any average modern Eng- 
lish company as believing in an Eternal life, and 
endeavour to draw any conclusions, from this 
assumed belief, as to their present business, 
they will forthwith tell you that what you say is 
very beautiful, but it is not practical. If, on 
the contrary, you frankly address them as un- 
believers in Eternal life, and try to draw any 
consequences from that unbelief, — they immedi- 
ately hold you for an accursed person, and shake 
off the dust from their feet at you." How is 
this to be explained? Why is it that the average 
church-goer resents the unqualified affirmation 
of a life beyond the grave? Doubtless to some 
extent he is influenced consciously or uncon- 
sciously by the prevailing habits of thought 
already referred to ; but there is another reason. 
Strange as it may appear, the average pro- 
fessor of religion prefers that the future life 
should not be discussed except in a form which 
convention should dictate, and convention pre- 
scribes that this form be no more than a pious 
aspiration. Listen to the startling assertion of 
a distinguished American divine: "A degree of 



18 THE FUTURE LIFE 

agnosticism touching the future life is tolerable 
to religious men today, which would have been 
quite intolerable in other days. It is not an acci- 
dent that in modern sermonic literature the sub- 
jects of heaven and hell bulk far less largely 
than they once did. In the absence of experi- 
mental proof few present-day thinkers are able 
to count immortality as other than a more or 
less well-grounded hope." 1 The situation is a 
curious one. It is difficult to avoid the conclu- 
sion that many good church-going people are 
afraid that the belief may turn out to be true. 
We have an exact parallel in the widespread 
^j repugnance to the preaching of that funda- 
mental change of moral and spiritual outlook 
which goes by the popular name "conversion." 
This doctrine, it is held, is suitable for the de- 
graded or vicious classes, for men and women 
of an emotional type, perhaps, who have been 
flagrant sinners or transgressors of social law, 
but quite inapplicable to law-abiding, respect- 
able citizens, to the educated and the conven- 
tionally "good." But now it was precisely to 
these latter classes that Christ preached the doc- 
trine, and it was their aversion to it that drew 
from Him His denunciation of Pharisee and 

1 A. C. McGiffert : The Rise of Modern Religious Ideas, p. 
163. 



IMMORTALITY AND MODERN MAN 19 

Sadducee. Here, then, are two great religious 
ideas which provoke annoyance and resentment 

W on the part of many apparently religious per- 
sons, and the question is : Why? The more one 
turns the matter over in one's mind, the more 
the conviction grows that the same psychologi- 
cal cause is at work in both cases. Many turn 
away from certainty of a future life and from 
the demand which brooks no denial for a pro- 
found transformation of their minds, for the 
same reason; acceptance of either idea would 
inevitably lead to a far-reaching disturbance of 

^ their normal, every-day lives, to a complete re- 
construction of their moral and social world. 
But as the years pass, the dull weight of custom, 
the inert, mechanical, and automatic force of 
convention, makes such a reversion of their 
normal existence a task to be evaded with all 
the stratagems at their command. Hence they 
make a compromise. They will not deny that 
within limits the Christian theory of repentance 
has its rights, but it must not interfere unduly 
with the claims of use and wont. So, too, with 
the idea of a future life. That also must not be 
denied, yet it must not be asserted, as if it 
were a fact like the law of gravitation, or like 
any of the data of experience, because if it were 
so asserted and accepted, they would be com- 



20 THE FUTUKE LIFE 

pelled to regard themselves and those about 
them in an altogether different light. They 
would awake to the claim of unsuspected duties 
and tasks. They would see their every act to 
be fraught with a significance unimaginably 
great. To escape such a revolution the idea of 
immortality must be lessened of its dynamic 
meaning, and its revolutionary power must be 
kept in check. 

But this method of dealing with a great prin- 
ciple brings its own Nemesis. "When, through 
some painful bereavement, the soul is awakened 
to the need for certainty, for some satisfying 
conception of the world into which the loved one 
has passed, nothing offers that can stand the 
scrutiny of the anxious heart, beset, as it is, 
with a host of questions 'that now clamour for 
an answer. How intently the mind strains into 
the darkness and vacancy to catch a gleam of 
living light! Where are the dead? How can 
they exist without a body? What is the mean- 
ing of resurrection? When will it be and how? 
Do the departed pass to the judgment of God 
immediately after death, or do they wait in a 
disembodied state for a public and formal assize 
at the last day? Do they inhabit other worlds? 
If so, as these worlds are constantly perishing, 
must not discarnate spirits migrate from world 



IMMORTALITY AND MODERN MAN 21 

to world? How are we to conceive of the em- 
ployments of those who have passed over? Are 
they near at hand or remote from us? Shall 
there be a meeting between loved ones again 
and mutual recognition or will not those who 
have passed over first have advanced to higher 
planes where the weakness or immaturity of 
those who come later may not reach? What 
kind of a sphere is it into which has gone that 
tender and loving spirit so dear to us on earth? 
Will there be friendly faces to offer a welcome 
to the newcomer ? Or is it an infinite void where 
in utter loneliness the spirit lives out its life 
shut up with the memories of its past? And 
when the intellect fails to create new perplexi- 
ties, the imagination conjures up a myriad 
phantoms to terrify and to confuse. 

The lesson such experiences should teach us 
is to get face to face with this problem and to 
come to terms with it. Sooner or later the hour 
when we shall be forced to face it will befall us, 
and then we may be in no condition to summon 
our souls to order and certainly we shall have 
lost the spiritual benefits of self-discipline and 
preparation. What a pathetic and even tragic 
circumstance is the fact that around us are 
thousands of men and women who all their life- 
time are subject to bondage through fear of 



22 THE FUTURE LIFE 

death either for themselves or for others ! And 
yet no true or worthy life can be lived till fear 
is trampled underfoot. We can do our work in 
peace and dignity only when we can say with 
Victor Hugo : " Death is not the dreary finish to 
life; it is its prolongation; my work is only 
begun, ' ' or with Emerson : l ' All that I have seen 
leads me to trust 1 God for what I have not 



seen. ' ' 



/ 



Outside religious circles, there are great 
varieties of attitude toward our problem. To 
begin with, there are the indifferent who hardly 
ever think of the matter and who spend no little 
energy in keeping it at arm's length. Why 
worry, they say, about death till death comes? 
One world at a time. We shall know all about 
it time enough; just now business and home, 
art and science, politics and social life can fill 
every moment. This appears to be a state of 
mind as unscientific as it is unnatural and 
impermanent. It is unnatural, for man is in 
essence a moral being, that is, he acts with 
a view to an end, to the accomplishment or 
enjoyment of something in the future. If man 
is not this, he is no better than the non-rational 
animal. The future to "a being of large dis- 
course, able to look before and after," has a 
significance for the present, whether that fu- 



IMMORTALITY AND MODERN MAN 23 

ture is only ten minutes ahead or ten years 
or a possible eternity. Indeed the present has 
no meaning except with a view to the future. 
Says Pascal: "The immortality of the soul is 
a thing which concerns us so mightily, which 
touches us so deeply, that it is necessary to 
have lost all feeling in order to be indifferent 
about it. All our actions and thoughts must 
take different paths according as there will be 
or will not be eternal goods to be hoped for, so 
that it is impossible to do anything with intelli- 
gence and judgment if it is not regulated by the 
view of that point which ought to be our final 
object." 1 Poets and moralists have often com- 
pared human life to a journey. Is it a sign of 
sound judgment or of prudence to entertain no 
curiosity about how the journey will end, 
whether in a black gulf of oblivion or in shining 
fields, and happy company and a sense of free- 
dom and refreshment? But normal or ab- 
normal, such a condition of mind is not fixed. 
It is at the mercy of a thousand accidents. At 
any moment the indifferent soul may be smitten 
by mortal loss, and awake to the agony of a 
parting that seems eternal. We may be be- 
lievers or sceptics, but indifferentists we cannot 
permanently be. 

1 Pensties. 



24 THE FUTURE LIFE 

There are others who while not indifferent to 
the life beyond the grave are content to say: "I 
do not know." Huxley, who invented the word 
"agnostic" to describe this mental attitude, 
maintained that as a scientific man he was 
unable either to affirm or to deny immortality. 
If any one says that the mind persists after the 
dissolution of the brain, the pure scientist must 
ask, How do you know? On the other hand, if 
any one denies such persistence, again the ques- 
tion must be, How do you know? Theoretically, 
such a position is tenable, practically it is not. 
Huxley himself could not carry his doctrine 
through amid the sad realities of experience. 
In reply to a letter of Charles Kingsley, who 
wrote him words of comfort on the loss of a 
dear child, the man of science flung over his 
agnostic doctrine and took refuge in a wondrous 
faith. ' ' The ledger of the Almighty, ' ' he wrote, 
"is strictly kept, and every one of us has the 
balance of his operations paid over to him at the 
end of every minute of his existence." Of 
course, he leaves himself open to his own query : 
How do you know? Are the pessimists all 
wrong? Are there no monstrous wrongs in- 
flicted on the innocent? In a world such as this, 
given over to intolerable miseries, to bitter suf- 
ferings that often fall on the noblest and the 



IMMORTALITY AND MODERN MAN 25 

most self-sacrificing of their kind, what scien- 
tific justification is there for the doctrine that 
the Almighty pays to every man at the end of 
every minute of his existence exactly what he 
deserves? Yet at bottom Huxley is right. God 
is just and in the end His justice will be mani- 
fested to every moral intelligence in the uni- 
verse. But this is not the language of science. 
It is the prophetic insight of faith. Huxley 
solved the problem practically for himself by 
taking Aristotle's advice. He lived as if he 
were immortal. His ethics was the ethics of an 
eternal being. In other words, he was an ag- 
nostic in name only, though his contemporaries 
in the heat of conflict often misunderstood 
him. 

The truth is, we must live, and we must live 
by some kind of belief or disbelief. Now either 
the soul persists after death or it does not. 
These are the alternatives, there is no other. 
You may ignore the whole question, and even 
pour contempt on those who expend thought 
upon it, but you do not thereby get rid of either 
horn of the dilemma, the great Either — Or on 
which hang interests unspeakably momentous. 
Immortality is either a fact or it is a falsehood. 
Do you say: Granted, but I am in no position 
to prove it to be one or other, therefore I can 



\ 



26 THE FUTURE LIFE 

make no affirmation either by way of belief or 
disbelief. Very well, but you are living as if one 
or other were true. Logically you may be en- 
titled to the name " agnostic, " but in actual 
practice you are a believer or a disbeliever. 
Thus in the very centre of your life there is a 
profound contradiction; thought and conduct, 
logic and practice go different roads, and you 
are content to be and to do what you are unable 
to justify at the bar of reason. Is it in this lame 
and impotent conclusion that a doctrine of 
agnosticism must land us? It is impossible to 
see that it can do otherwise. Only the elect few, 
however, are likely to live as if they were im- 
mortal, if all the time they suspect themselves 
to be only mortal. The majority will more 
probably decline upon a matter-of-fact point of 
view and will regard the immediate present as 
their true and only concern. In other words, 
they will act on the belief that the soul is not 
immortal. Renouncing vain dreams of the 
future, they will be prone to renounce as quix- 
otic and inappropriate to such poor and insig- 
nificant beings as men are, all those ideals of 
self-sacrifice, of devotion unto death to some 
great cause which have till now been "the foun- 
tain-light of all our day, the master-light of all 
our seeing.' y In a word, agnosticism is simply 



IMMORTALITY AND MODERN MAN 27 

a refuge from the inconveniences of open and 
frank discussion and as such is a sign of intel- 
lectual pusillanimity. Hence bolder spirits de- 
cline the shelter from the storm of critical de- 
bate, and come out in the open as the cham- 
pions of dogmatic materialism. Among these 
may be named Professor Haeckel, Professor 
Metchnikoff, and Mr. Edward Clodd. 

Professor Haeckel lays down three proposi- 
tions with all the dogmatic assurance and abso- 
lute finality of an ancient Church Council: 1, 
there is no living, personal God; 2, the will is 
not free; 3, the soul is not immortal. These 
assertions deny the three fundamental truths of 
religion which from his point of view are the 
" three buttresses of superstition. ' ' All the 
proofs of arguments for life after death are 
overturned by the conclusions of modern 
science, and these in turn may be summed up 
in the now accepted commonplace of physiology 
that our mental life is a function of the grey 
matter of the brain, from which it follows that 
the function vanishes with the dissipation of 
its organ. To suppose that thought can sur- 
vive the brain would be equivalent to supposing 
that the steam in a tea-kettle could survive the 
destruction of the tea-kettle. Man is simply a 
creature of the natural order. His brain is a 



28 THE FUTURE LIFE 

highly organized composite of certain chemical 
elements over which gleams a temporary phos- 
phorescence, a by-product of molecular activity, 
and this by-product we call consciousness. To 
j Professor Haeckel it seems as absurd to say 
J that digestion can continue after the stomach 
has been destroyed as to say that mind can 
persist after the brain has perished. He does 
not hesitate to affirm that "the belief in the 
immortality of the soul is a dogma which is in 
hopeless contradiction with the most solid con- 
firmed truths of modern science. ' ' * And Mr. 
Joseph McCabe, his English disciple, holds that 
when we know more about the brain's structure 
and chemistry we may find that they are per- 
fectly competent to account for all mental proc- 
esses. Metchnikoff in his Nature of Man with 
equal hardihood maintains that "a future life 
has no single argument to support it, and the 
non-existence of life after death is in consonance 
with the whole range of human knowledge." 

Mr. Edward Clodd, a well-known contributor 
to English "rationalist" literature, was asked 
in 1915 by the editor of the International Psy- 
chic Gazette to send a message of comfort to 
those bereaved by the war. He replied : " As the 
evidence that we possess seems to me conclusive 

1 Riddle of the Universe, p. 210. 



IMMORTALITY AND MODERN MAN 29 

against survival after death, I can say nothing 
on the lines which you suggest." x 

Now all these pronouncements are specimens 
of sheer dogmatism. Where is the evidence that 
disproves the persistence of personality after 
death? All that is offered us is another dogma 
about the existence of "substance" which is 
named "ether"; mind and matter are simply 
forms or aspects of the one eternal substance. 
Throughout the entire universe, in matter and 
in mind, there rules the great abstract law of 
mechanical causality. i ' The monism of the uni- 
verse based on the law of substance proclaims 
the absolute dominion of the great eternal iron 
laws." These abstract notions are in no sense 
evidence for or against anything. We can sum 
them up by saying that the soul's continuance 
after death is impossible because it is opposed 
to the monistic assumptions of Haeckel's phi- 
losophy. The dogmatic materialist not only can 
bring forward no evidence against immortality, 
he refuses to consider the evidence for it which 
is being slowly accumulated by men of the first 
distinction in science and philosophy. Nothing 
so betrays the narrowness of a certain type 
of specialized mind as the determination to ig- 
nore the evidence of psychic research on the 

1 Quoted by J. A. Hill in Man Is a Spirit, p. 13. 



30 THE FUTURE LIFE 

ground that such evidence avails nothing 
against the fundamental principle: conscious- 
ness is a function of brain. When the advocate 
of the soul allows that for many minds trained 
in laboratory methods the only satisfactory 
answer is to isolate the phenomena, to show 
proofs of the activity of mind after the material 
organism has perished, the dogmatic materialist 
declines to follow his chosen method of observa- 
tion and experiment, on the ground that the 
evidence so obtained can be referred either to 
fraud, or to the tricks of the subconscious factor 
in mind. When such men as Henry Sidgwick, 
Arthur J. Balfour, William James, F. W. H. 
Myers, Sir Oliver Lodge, Camille Flammarion, 
Charles Eichet, James H. Hyslop, William 
Crookes — to name only a few — have asserted 
after many years' investigation and study that 
at least there is a great psychological problem 
on the solution of which may depend the most 
vital interests of mankind, one may suppose 
that a policy of ridicule or of sullen silence 
on the part of the dogmatic materialist will 
not avail and that sooner or later he will be 
forced to face the evidence and to offer some 
coherent, intelligible, and acceptable interpre- 
tation of it. When that day comes his dogma- 
tism will vanish, and he will discover that the 



IMMOETALITY AND MODERN MAN 31 

universe being much more mysterious than he 
had imagined, his categories of thought must 
needs be enlarged so as to include the new 
phenomena. As James remarks, the universe 
will be shown to be a more many-sided affair 
than any sect, even the scientific sect, allows for. 
In spite, however, of the various influences 
making against belief in a life beyond, there are 
cheering signs of a turn in the spiritual tide. 
The sufferings and bereavements of the war 
\ have recalled the minds of men to the underly- 
ing realities of existence. The old yet ever-new 
questions demand an answer: Is there a God? 
And if so what kind of a God is He? Has He 
spoken to man? Is there a soul? If so, what 
is it? For what purpose are we on this planet? 
What is the meaning and end of life? And no 
question is more poignant, more laden with the 
soul's hopes and fears than this : After death — 
what? Hence a new and living interest in the 
presuppositions, the conditions, the possibility, 
the nature of the future life, has been created. 
Ancient solutions, time-worn arguments no 
longer tell. The metaphysical theories and ec- 
clesiastical doctrines that satisfied our grand- 
fathers are as broken reeds today. Yet if an 
age is to be judged by the books which it writes 
and reads, never were men more anxious to gain 



32 THE FUTURE LIFE 

some certain footing amid the uncertainties of 
thought about the other side of death than they 
are at the present time. It is becoming increas- 
ingly difficult to force belief by coercive author- 
ity on minds touched by the modern spirit; 
nevertheless, the failure of civilization, the in- 
stability attaching to what seemed the solid 
realities of experience, have driven thought and 
hope beyond the earthly horizon in search of an 
abiding foundation. The yoke of tradition is 
broken, but the free wind of inspiration is 
blowing on the highways of the world, and new 
hopes are stirring within the human heart. 

The rise of the Psychical Research movement 
marked by the founding of the English Society 
in 1882 under the presidentship of Professor 
Henry Sidgwick, probably the most judicial 
mind in the England of his day, called attention 
to a vast mass of facts ignored by academic 
science which point to the existence of super- 
normal powers of certain peculiarly endowed 
persons called " psychics' 9 or " sensitives.' ' It 
was believed that science was failing in its 
duty to the world as long as these obscure 
phenomena were allowed to remain in the 
hands of ignorance, fraud, or charlatanry. 
Such men as Mr. W. E. Gladstone, Sir 0. 
Lodge, F. W. H. Myers, John Ruskin, Pro- 



IMMORTALITY AND MODERN MAN 33 

fessor Barrett, Professor James, Sir W. 
Crookes, Mr. Gerald W. Balfour, Mr. Andrew 
Lang, Bishop Boyd Carpenter took a great in- 
terest in the work, and some of them have made 
distinct contributions to psychological science. 
Owing mainly to the credulity and superstition 
of ordinary spiritualism, and to the fraudulent 
devices of many so-called "mediums," the 
movement in America lags far behind the Eng- 
lish movement both in popular support and in 
the type of mind enlisted in its advocacy. As an 
illustration of the conventional spirit that 
reigns in academic circles in America, it may 
be mentioned that when some years ago a sum 
of money was bequeathed to a certain univer- 
sity for the investigation of psychic phenomena, 
according to the most approved scientific 
methods, the legacy was not accepted until 
other seats of learning had been sounded as to 
whether the use of money for such a purpose 
was seemly and appropriate ! The aversion of 
the great body of scientific men to psychical 
research arises partly from a priori prejudice 
against any doctrine which if proved true w r ould 
shatter the framework of their views as "to 
the principles that govern the universe,'' and 
partly, as Professor Barrett says, "from a 
disregard of the essential difference between 



34 THE FUTURE LIFE 

physical and psychical science. The only gate- 
ways of knowledge according to the former are 
the familiar organs of sense, whereas the latter 
indicates that these gateways can be occasion- 
ally transcended. The main object of physical 
science is to measure and forecast, and from its 
phenomena life and free will must be eliminated. 
Psychical phenomena can neither be measured 
nor forecast, as in their case the influence of 
life and volition can neither be eliminated nor 
foreseen. ' ' 1 Psychic phenomena may be di- 
vided into (1) physical, (2) mental. Some of 
the physical type are so astounding as to be 
incredible, though attested by men of the 
highest scientific standing and of blameless in- 
tegrity. Among these may be mentioned: (a) 
the tipping of tables with but slight contact of 
the hands of a certain number of sitters, (b) 
the moving of tables without any contact what- 
ever, (c) the increase of weight in a table so 
that the muscular strength of a strong man 
could not raise it from the ground, (d) the 
floating of the table in mid-air during which the 
psychic increases in weight by an amount prac- 
tically equal to the weight of the table, (e) 
rappings in or on a table or on the walls of a 
room by which intelligible messages have been 

1 Psychical Research, p. 34. 



IMMORTALITY AND MODERN MAN 35 

spelled out. 1 These rappings vary in loudness 
from the slightest taps to blows which shake 
the room as though a sledge-hammer were being 
wielded by an invisible operator. 

But however impressive to the average mind 
the physical manifestations may be, the mental 
phenomena are likely to be those that will yield 
the best results. At all events, these latter 
appeal strongly to those interested first and 
foremost in survival. They consist of communi- 
cations purporting to come from deceased per- 
sons through an intermediary spirit called "the 
control' ' who has possession of the psychic's 
organism for the time being. The method may 
be either oral or written while the psychic is 
either in a condition of trance or fully conscious. 
Hardly a week passes that a volume does not 
appear containing discussions, discourses, and 
even highly complicated and artistic stories 
which have come by automatic speech or writ- 
ing, or through the agency of some mechanical 
device, such as the planchette or the ouija board. 
An attempt will be made to appraise the value 
of this evidence in another part of this book. 
Here it suffices to say that as the experiments 

1 Those interested in the physical phenomena of spiritism 
may be referred to C. Flammarion, Les Forces naturelles in- 
cormues; Dr. Crawford's Reality of Psychic Phenomena; Von 
Schrenck-Notzing, Materialisations-phanomene. 



36 THE FUTUEE LIFE 

go on and the experimenters grow in skill, mes- 
sages have been received so convincing in their 
proof of identity to the persons receiving them, 
that some of the most critical and cautions ob- 
servers have abandoned their donbts and have 
proclaimed themselves believers in a life after 
death. 

With the new interest in the possibility of a 
post-mortem existence and under the strain of 
intolerable grief created by the war, many un- 
happy hearts have tried to find comfort in the 
supposed messages from loved ones purporting 
to come through mediums who make money out 
of their alleged or genuine gift and who are, 
therefore, tempted to give something in return 
for payment. It may be taken as a safe rule — 
suspect the motives of any "medium' ' who 
accepts money and at the same time refuses to 
put himself or herself under rigid scientific con- 
trol. To those in grief and anxious to get into 
touch with their loved friends who have passed 
over, I would earnestly say: Avoid all pro- 
fessional mediums, clairvoyants, and crystal- 
gazers, and communicate with the American 
Psychical Eesearch Society, the officials of 
which will be happy to give wise and trust- 
worthy counsel. 

Lastly, the expansion and, as it were, de- 



IMMORTALITY AND MODERN MAN 37 

materialization of the physical universe indi- 
rectly makes for belief in the spirituality and 
abiding work of personality. Modern science 
builds the mighty fabric of organized knowledge 
in what turns out to be supersensible realities. 
Matter which the popular mind conceives to be 
solid and substantial is not what it seems; on 
the contrary, it contradicts all that is usually 
asserted about it. It resolves itself into centres 
of electrical energy. All matter, however dif- 
ferent in form, has a common basis. The ulti- 
mate atoms, we are now told, consist of units 
of negative electricity, and of an equal number 
of units of positive electricity; nothing further 
has been as yet discovered as to their nature. 
This solid unyielding framework of things fades 
away into realities that can be apprehended 
only by the speculative intellect. There are 
depths below depths. Ether, a highly specu- 
lative reality, believed to be present in all space, 
and to penetrate the densest forms of ordinary 
matter, makes possible the propagation of heat, 
light, and electrical action. Now the more 
mysterious and unsearchable the ways of nature 
become, the less incredible is the suspicion that 
there is in man a force indestructible like all 
other forces and that over him death has not 
dominion. Mark the changed attitude toward 



A 



38 THE FUTURE LIFE 

" miracle' ' and the "supernatural." These 
question-begging terms no longer affright us. 
We know today that miracles do happen, if by 
miracle is meant, as Augustine says, not an 
event contrary to nature but only to nature as 
we know it. We feel sure that, however ex- 
traordinary the event, with wider knowledge it 
w r ould be found to fall under the operation of 
laws of wider scope than any we are as yet 
familiar with. As the universe grows upon us 
in depth, in subtle refinement, in approximation 
to what we call spirit, the negations of material- 
ism lose their weight, and the great idea is tak- 
ing possession of many thoughtful persons that 
not matter but mind is the ultimate reality ; that, 
therefore, not death but life is the last word and 
everlasting fact. 



CHAPTER III 

THE DESIRE FOR IMMORTALITY 

There is a very popular belief, fostered by 
much of our hymnology and preaching, that 
everybody is intensely desirous of living on 
after death; and that even the few who have 
abandoned hope of doing so, cannot wholly sup- 
press the wish that it were otherwise. Hence, — 
so the argument runs, — a desire so universal 
cannot but imply the existence of a correspond- 
ing reality. ' ' The heart has reasons which the 
Eeason cannot understand. The philosopher in 
rummaging through the treasure-house of the 
soul finds the idea of immortality and also the 
desire for it. He cannot help asking if this de- 
sire for immortality may not be evidence of 
man's capacity for it. If there is an appetite for 
life everlasting, the chances are that the appetite 
will not go unsatisfied. If the heart's aspira- 
tions keep leaping toward eternity, it is not 
unlikely that eternity has some blessed thing in' 
store." 1 

1 C. E. Jefferson : Why We May Believe vn Life After Death, 
pp. 137, 138, 

39 



40 THE FUTURE LIFE 

This argument unquestionably makes a 
powerful appeal to the emotions; but the emo- 
tions are not given us in order to guide us to 
truth. They have their place in strict subordi- 
nation to reason. They can stimulate the ra- 
tional powers and lend dynamic force to the 
will, but by themselves they are no criterion of 
truth. It is not their function to form a path- 
way to reality. We shall see a little later what 
element of truth lies in the contention. It is 
so obscure indeed that it is liable to create illu- 
sion and foster unwarranted expectations. 

But it may be well to say first a few words 
about the primary assertion that the desire for 
immortality is universal. All men, we are told, 
long for personal continuance after death. 

Do they? It is true that the majority of 
religions have held up the hope of immortality 
before the eyes of men, yet the Hebrew faith, as 
the prophets proclaimed it, and the religion of 
Buddha in its purest form renounced the 
thought, the one teaching that man's real des- 
tiny was limited by the grave, the other prom- 
ising as the prize to be won, Nirvana, in which 
consciousness shall be "as a blown-out lamp." 
The pessimism of the East, which looks forward 
to sheer annihilation, has invaded the West, and 
philosophers like Schopenhauer and poets like 



THE DESIRE FOR IMMORTALITY 41 

Thomson and Swinburne have glorified death as 
the last and highest word of the universe to its 
creature, man. 

Leconte de Lisle, the popular French poet, 
apostrophizes death as man's truest friend: 
"Thou, Divine Death, into which everything 
returns and is blotted out of being, receive thy 
children into thy serene bosom; enfranchize us 
from time, number and states, and give back to 
us the repose which life has troubled." 

Mr. H. Gr. Wells, who has exchanged agnosti- 
cism for an ardent and even belligerent theism, 
regards with supreme indifference personal con- 
tinuance after death. "Many people," he says, 
"seem to find the prospect of a final personal 
death unendurable. This impresses me as 
egotism. I have no such appetite for a separate 
\ immortality. ' ' 1 Mr. G. Bernard Shaw, how- 
ever much he differs from Mr. Wells on other 
matters, agrees with him here. "I have a 
strong feeling," he remarks, "that I shall be 
glad when I am dead and done for — scrapped 
at last to make room for somebody better, 
cleverer, more perfect than myself." 2 

Professor J. H. Leuba informs us that of the 
highly educated men of scientific temper to 

1 God the Invisible King, preface, p. xix. 

a Quoted by J. H. Holmes Is Death the End?, p. 314. 



4 



42 THE FUTURE LIFE 

whom he put the question whether they desired 
immortality, 27 per cent, did not desire it at 
all, 39 per cent, desired it moderately, and only 
34 per cent, admitted that they desired it 
intensely. 

Moreover, when appeal is made to the passion 
for life we must not forget that sad phenomenon 
of our time, the passion for death. Sociological 
experts tell us that before the war suicide was 
alarmingly on the increase. It is obvious that 
only the man who has convinced himself that 
death ends all can risk the chance in which so 
many of his fellow-men believe, that it does not 
end all, and rather than bear the troubles that 
he has, prefers those that he knows not of. 
When some overwhelming calamity, a bitter 
sorrow or an intolerable shame, overtakes the 
modern man, he broods on death as a door of 
escape. 

"To die — to sleep — 
To sleep ! perchance to dream, ay, there 's the rub, 
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come." 

It is the " dreams " that daunt at times the 
suicide's purpose. If only he could be sure! 
It is the fear lest, after all, the burden he would 
lay down may await him behind the veil, that 



THE DESIRE FOR IMMORTALITY 43 

puzzles his will, and gives pause to his resolve. 
For one who succeeds in silencing the voice of 
nature, there are probably many who draw 
back, unable to face the unknown, because by no 
means certain that it spells extinction. But 
must not facts like these modify the notion of 
a universal desire for a future life? 

Yet there is something to be said on the other 
side. Much of the suppression or renunciation 
of a wish for personal immortality springs from 
a false or contracted view of the life beyond. 
Buddhism was a Gospel of hope to the people 
of India. It freed them from the intolerable 
incubus of a non-moral universe, of endless 
Heavens and Hells, arbitrary in character, 
which threatened to crush out the spiritual life. 
Better a thousand times the passionless non- 
existence of Nirvana than an infinite series of 
rewards and punishments which had no organic 
connection with the moral states of the saved 
or the lost. The same reaction may be found 
in the history of Christian thought. Schleier- 
macher, whose influence on modern religious 
thought has been so far-reaching, is often 
quoted as an illustration of how a great Chris- 
tian thinker can get along without any convic- 
• tion as to a life hereafter. But the motive of 
his doubt is more significant than the doubt 



44 THE FUTURE LIFE 

itself. "The secret selfishness, the hidden 
earthly sentiment, the manner in which the 
majority of men picture immortality to them- 
selves, and their longing after that, seem to me 
irreligious ; nay, their wish to be immortal has 
no foundation but their aversion to the real 
goal of religion. They have no wish to escape 
from the familiar limitations and at best long 
for wider eyes and better limbs. But God 
speaks to them in the words of Scripture: 4 He 
who loses his life for My sake shall find it.' 
They might at least try to begin their life for 
the love of God, to sink their own personality 
even here and to live in the One and the 
Whole.' ' 

In these noble words we read a rejection of 
immortality in the interests of religion itself! 
But may we not conclude that the wish for per- 
sonal survival would re-emerge, if only this 
wish could be so formulated as to be worthy 
alike of man and of God? Not by the destruc- 
tion of the desire, but by its purification from 
every taint of meanness and self-seeking, can 
man rise to his true dignity as an ethical and 
aspiring personality. 

The same principle comes to light in the 
feeling of Mr. Shaw. He wishes when death 
comes to make way for somebody better and 



THE DESIRE FOR IMMORTALITY 45 

abler than himself. Such a thought could 
only come to one who conceives of the future 
world as purely static, from which the bound- 
less possibilities of intellectual and spiritual 
growth are excluded. Mr. Shaw has visions of 
social betterment, glimpses ideals in art and 
literature not yet realized, and knows that 
ethically the goal for which he strives is a flying 
one. Would he turn away in weariness of soul 
from a future life where these prophecies might 
receive progressive fulfilment? It is clear that 
he is unconsciously carrying over into the world 
beyond some undissolved residuum of thought 
belonging to the very orthodoxy which he had 
imagined himself to have outgrown. 

Besides, on this matter there is variety of 
experience, and names of weight may be quoted 
on the other side. Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson, 
whose attitude toward historical Christianity is 
as critical and at times as hostile as that of 
Mr. Wells or Mr. Shaw, has written words 
which show that he stands the poles apart from 
the current literary conception. " Western op- 
timism in my opinion," he says, "is doomed 
unless we can believe that there is more sig- 
nificance in individual lives than appears upon 
the surface ; that there is a destiny reserved for 
them more august than any to which they can 



i 



46 THE FUTURE LIFE 

attain in their life of threescore years and ten. 
On this point I can, of course, speak my own 
conviction, — the conviction that at the bottom 
of every human soul, even of those that deny it, 
there lurks the insatiable hunger for eternity; 
that we desire, in Browning's phrase, something 
that will 

* Make time break 
And let us pent-up creatures through 
Into eternity, our due ; ' 

and that nothing short of this will ever appear, 
in the long run, once men have begun to think 
and feel, to be a sufficient justification and 
apology for the life into which we are born." * 

Mr. Dickinson's conviction is in line with that 
of the greatest master of poetic art in the nine- 
teenth century. "I can hardly understand," 
says Tennyson, " how any great imaginative 
man, who has deeply lived, suffered, thought 
and wrought, can doubt of the soul's continuous 
progress in the after-life." 2 James Knowles, 
the friend of Tennyson, says of him: "His be- 
lief in personal immortality was passionate — I 
think almost the strongest passion he had." 



3 



1 Religion and Immortality, p. 43. 

•Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son, Vol. I, p. 
321. 

3 Nineteenth Century, January, 1893. 



THE DESIRE FOR IMMORTALITY 47 

Or take the testimony of Dr. Felix Adler, the 
honored head of the Ethical Culture Movement, 
who certainly is not biased by any theological 
motive: "As for myself I admit that I do not 
I so much desire immortality as that I do not see 
| how I can escape it. If I as an individual am 
actually under obligation to achieve perfection, 
if the command, 'Be ye therefore perfect,' is 
addressed, not only to the human race in gen- 
eral, but to every single member of it (and it 
is thus that I must interpret the moral im- 
perative), then on moral grounds I do not 
see how my being can stop short of the attain- 
ment marked out for it, of the goal set up 
for it." 1 

Even in the case of those unhappy souls for 
whom life has lost its savour and who turn 
from it in disgust, it may well be questioned 
whether in every instance the passion for death 
is the hope of or belief in extinction. Many a 
suicide has left behind him a pathetic prayer for 
forgiveness, not from man only, but still more 
from God, because of the motive of the deed, 
perhaps unbearable mental or physical pain; 
perhaps overstrained remorse for some shame- 
ful memory, some " rooted sorrow," which no 
healing hand could "pluck from the brain." 

x Life and Destiny, pp. 38-39. 



48 THE FUTURE LIFE 

These prayers, we may well believe, will not go 
unheard of the Eternal Compassion, but how 
could they ever have been offered by any one 
believing that death for him meant eternal un- 
consciousness? On the contrary, they imply 
that the suppliant believes that there is a world 
beyond where he may have to answer for his 
act, but he feels that he cannot be worse off 
there than here, and that if misery should be- 
fall, at least it will not be the misery that now 
drowns his being in darkness. And thus it 
happens that the suicide called to testify 
against our belief turns out not infrequently 
to be a witness for it. 

On the whole, then, we seem justified in con- 
cluding that though the longing for a future 
life does not characterize all men, nor is always 
at full tide in the experience of any particular 
man, yet it does appear, consciously or sub- 
consciously, in the great majority of the race, 
in one form or another. The desire may thin 
out into a vague and uncertain inclination to- 
ward a vision but dimly apprehended, or it may 
rise into a burning intensity, as in the experi- 
ence of the great mystics, in which all finite 
interests are consumed ; but the desire in some 
degree cannot be denied to be an all but uni- 
versal possession of humanity. Nor can it be 



THE DESIEE FOR IMMORTALITY 49 

doubted that many, — and they not among the 
least critical and reflective of their kind, — find 
in this belief and hope the only alternative to 
pessimism, the only rational clue to the riddle 
of life. It is in the religious history of man 
that the hope is seen especially to be a normal 
part of man's spiritual experience. From the 
animism of the savage up to the most refined J 
belief of civilized man, the idea of immortality 
has been at work, though at certain epochs and 
among certain peoples it has fallen under an 
eclipse. Not only so, but wherever the creative 
energy of mind has functioned at its loftiest 
levels of inspiration, as in the prophetic insight 
of a Plato, a Goethe, or an Emerson, it has been 
unable to brook the thought that at last its 
sovereign strength should be laid low in the dust 
of a non-spiritual nature. 

When we have said all this, it still remains to 
ask what bearing it has upon our problem? I 
am unable to see that the desire for immortality 
has any direct or vital bearing on the fact of 
immortality. It seems as though both the de- 
fenders and the opponents of the doctrine have 
exaggerated the importance of man's desire for 
a life in the Beyond, though, of course, for very 
different reasons. How can our wishes, what- 
ever pragmatic value they may have in our 



50 THE FUTURE LIFE 

limited experience, be any true index to the ulti- 
mate quality of the universe? How do we know 
that the order of things is friendly to our long- 
ing? The existence of the most insistent long- 
(ing does not guarantee the reality of the object 
longed for. 

I may desire to write another "Hamlet" or 
"Faust" or amass a monstrous fortune or 
t achieve a thousand and one wonders that would 
^ be eminently serviceable for the world ; but what 
warrant do these yearnings offer that they will 
find fulfilment? So, too, I may desire to over- 
leap the barriers of the grave, yet what avails 
it, if the natural order says "no"? Besides 
if I desire a thing, it can only be because I set 
a value on it, and this I cannot do unless I 
know or suspect something as to its nature. If 
I wish for a continuance of my personal con- 
sciousness after death it must be because I con- 
ceive that in some way such continuance will 
minister to my well-being. How do I know this ? 
Who has explored the undiscovered country and 
has returned to report upon its nature and char- 
acteristics? In short, turn the matter as we 
may in our minds, we cannot avoid the conclu- 
sion that our desire to live after death is simply 
an enlargement of primitive racial instincts, 
born of our ancestral reactions to the pressure 



THE DESIRE FOR IMMORTALITY 51 

of natural forces. We want to live on because 
on the whole we feel life is good. 

What now about the desire, not for life but 
for death as a final fact ? Do you say : I have 
feasted well at the banquet of life ; why should 
I not make way for another guest? I am sur- 
feited with all that life had to give, aesthetic and 
sensuous enjoyment, the pleasures of the intel- 
lect, the happiness of loving and of being loved. 
I am more than satisfied, and now, farewell ! 

"Asking no heaven, we fear no fabled hell. 
Life is a feast and we have banqueted — 
Shall not the worms as well ? 



a 



The after-silence when the feast is o 'er, 
And void the places where the minstrels stood, 

Differs in nought from what has been before, 
And is nor ill, nor good." * 



To use Mr. Wells's phrase: "This impresses 
me as egotism.' ' What right have you to 
imagine that the universe is so constructed as 
to gratify your wishes, created by disgust or 
indifference for existence? Why should the 
world-whole be supposed to be governed by your 
sense of sensuous and intellectual repletion? 
What about the myriads who have suffered per- 

1 William Watson : The Great Misgiving. 



52 THE FUTURE LIFE 

haps the most tragic fate that can befall the 
soul, the crushing out, that is to say, of intel- 
lectual energies by the brute force of circum- 
stance, the sacrifice of all that is divine in life 
by the slow corrosion of sordid cares and mean 
necessities? Has the universe nothing to say to 
these victims of evil fortune except to award 
them the crowning sadness of a contemptuous 
dismissal to the black night of nothingness ? If 
we could convince ourselves of this, we must 
resign all hope of understanding the meaning of 
life, and the world, ethically considered, is no 
longer, in Carlylian phrase, a God's cosmos, 
but a Devil's chaos. 

If it be said that the desire to survive death 
is low and selfish, a vulgar clinging to our own 
poor, petty, and constricted interests, the 
answer must be that at its best our revolt 
against the extinction of the rational spirit is 
motived by the agonizing reflection that others 
whom we have known and loved, and whose his- 
tory has been a benediction to the world, should, 
in the plenitude of their moral and rational 
powers, be doomed to annihilation. It is 
against this unintelligible decree that our 
noblest instincts rise up in passionate protest. 
Assure me that these other lives, so noble and 
so fair, so rich in the beauteous things of the 



THE DESIRE FOE IMMORTALITY 53 

spirit, shall not be quenched in the dust of 
death, and if need be, I shall renounce my wish 
for my own continuance, and be content to have 
it so. "When a man passionately refuses to 
believe that the * wages of virtue' can be dust, 
it is often less from any private reckoning about 
his own wages than from a disinterested aver- 
sion to a universe so fundamentally irrational 
that 'good for the individual' is not ultimately 
identified with universal good. ' ' 1 

We conclude, then, that the desire for the 
after-life, when purified of its baser alloy, is 
more consonant with man's moral and spiritual 
integrity than indifference or aversion, yet of 
itself cannot constitute a ground of belief. It 
is a suggestion, but for the basis of our con- 
viction we must look elsewhere. 

On the other hand, our desires have their 
place in the selection of the ends for which we 
live. One man has as much a right to wish for 
a future life, in which any virtue acquired here 
may go on to perfection, as another man has to 
desire wealth and social place in this world. In 
both cases, the ideals set before the mind are 
constituted by hopes and fears. Were there no 
wish for an after-existence, the problem of 
human destiny would soon cease to engage our 

1 Henry Sidgwick: The Methods of Ethics, p. 504. 



54 THE FUTURE LIFE 

interest ; it would die from sheer inanition. A 
worthy ambition to live on after death is not 
the sign of a moral weakling or of a nature cast 
in a negative mould. It would be in harmony 
with an optimistic view of the world to say that 
such a desire ought not to be baulked of its 
realization, but whether this is so or not must 
be determined by the findings of ethical reflec- 
tion, of spiritual intuition, and of such discov- 
eries as deeper knowledge of the psychic depths 
of personality may reveal. 



CHAPTER IV 

HINDRANCES TO BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY 

Death has been called "the great common- 
place," but it is a commonplace that never fails 
to awaken our astonishment. And perhaps 
never so poignantly as today has this challenge 
stirred the hearts of men. The premature cut- 
ting off of millions that formed the flower of the 
race has, as might be expected, created the most 
painful reactions in the general mind, and men 
are asking as they have never asked before: 
What is Death? Is there anything beyond the 
veil ? If there is something, what is it ? Bitter 
and painful experiences are driving multitudes 
to put these questions, and even in profess- 
edly religious circles, the tragic fact is that the 
oracles are dumb, and that no articulate answer 
is forthcoming. All unconsciously to them- 
selves, their traditional faith in a future life 
has been slowly undermined and when the day 
of adversity has come, they find themselves 
without a refuge, staring into the black pit of 
despair. Doubtless in all ages belief in immor- 
tality has been shadowed with difficulty and mis- 

55 



56 THE FUTURE LIFE 

giving. The obvious phenomena of death, the 
inability of the mind to visualize the transition 
from an incarnate to a discarnate state, or to 
picture the form which life assumes in the world 
beyond — these have always been sinister argu- 
ments even among the uncultivated. Moreover, 
immortality has from time to time shared the 
fate of other great beliefs, such as God and 
Freedom, in accordance with the ruling forces 
of any given age. In the period of the Enlight- 
enment, for example, which taught man's native 
ability to obey the moral law, the autonomy of 
his will, and in a word his moral independence, 
it is clear that a doctrine of immortality formu- 
lated in terms of rewards and punishments 
could have no standing. What need of such 
extraneous supports, if man has the power to 
become virtuous of himself, and has an inborn 
tendency to realize the good? No wonder that 
the century which had identified immortality 
with a scheme of "prize-morality" should find 
the first incredible when it found the second 
superfluous. 

Now if we look back on the past fifty or sixty 
years, we shall find, in addition to those funda- 
mental handicaps to belief arising from the 
domination exercised over us by the senses and 
the failure of imagination to conceive or picture 



HINDRANCES TO BELIEF 57 

the immaterial, certain specific causes at work 
which account for the present widespread doubt 
and denial. These causes, I believe, will be 
found to be three : 1. The breakdown of religious 
authority as embodied in codes and laws and 
institutions, and more specifically, the dissolu- 
tion of the traditional forms in which faith in 
immortality has been expressed, under the com- 
bined influence of advancing ethical insight and 
deeper knowledge of the New Testament. 2. 
The rise of modern materialism, which, in the 
popular mind, is bound up with the triumphs of 
natural science; and more particularly, that 
form of materialism which finds in conscious- 
ness simply a function of the brain, and there- 
fore sharing the fate of the brain. 3. The rise 
and spread of Socialism among the wage- 
earning classes, and more especially the doc- 
trine of Karl Marx and his followers, with its 
materialistic conception of history and its re- 
sultant denial of spirit in man. 

I. THE BREAKDOWN OF THE TRADITIONAL FORM OF 
THE IMMORTAL HOPE 

Whatever we may hold as to the origin of the 
belief in a future life — and it is probable that 
this origin is to be found in the ghosts which 



58 THE FUTURE LIFE 

visited the dreams of savage men — it is not to 
be denied that the belief itself has sunk its roots 
deep in the soil of religion and has drawn 
thence its tenacity and power. Hence it has be- 
come a religious phenomenon, and the hope 
which it offers to the human heart is shaped by 
the specific religion in which it appears ; nor is 
it at all certain that these ancient beliefs did 
not rest, in many instances, on good and genu- 
ine experiences, and we may say : as is the re- 
ligion so is the faith in immortality ; the higher 
the religion the more spiritual is its doctrine of 
the future. 

Now when we turn to the Christian religion 
we are at once struck by the contrast between 
the teaching of its Founder and that of His 
disciples. The characteristic features of 
Christ's treatment of the question are unwaver- 
ing and sublime assurance of the fact of im- 
mortality with great reserve as to its nature 
and precise conditions. Only a few of His say- 
ings, and two or three of His parables enshrine 
His convictions about human destiny. Yet He 
has so transfigured the beliefs and conceptions 
of all who had gone before Him that Chris- 
tianity has been justly called the religion of 
immortality. The paradox is resolved when we 
remember that it was not His teaching only but 



HINDRANCES TO BELIEF 59 

far more his post-mortem appearances to His 
followers that created the dynamic of His reli- 
gion. Over against the apparent meagreness of 
Christ's words stands the rich luxuriance of 
visions and doctrines and hopes as seen re- 
flected in the writings of Evangelist and 
Apostle. Around the simple belief in continued 
communion with God beyond death, thus gath- 
ered in the course of time a complicated series 
of beliefs, taken over for the most part from 
Jewish tradition and environment, and handed 
down to the modern world as moral and re- 
ligious truth. It is the presence of this Jewish 
Apocalyptic element in the teaching of the 
churches that explains why so many turn away 
from all thought about the future life as futile 
and hopeless. Moreover, it is to be noted that 
the idea of Heaven in the Book of Eevelation 
reflects the socio-political life of the time. 
Heaven is pictured as a palace with spacious 
gardens and golden gates, God as a Potentate 
clothed with might and majesty, and man as a 
being prostrate before Him in reverent sub- 
jection. There are, indeed, other elements 
created by the new spirit of the Gospel, but 
they are incidental and subordinate. " People 
do not believe in a future life," writes a well- 
known Anglican scholar, "because the forms 



60 THE FUTURE LIFE 

in which the belief has been presented to their 
minds, seem, on the one hand, to be intel- 
lectually untenable, and on the other, to be 
unattractive or even repellent. Traditional 
pictures of Hell seem morally revolting; while 
the Heaven of Sunday School teaching or 
popular hymnology is a place which the plain 
man does not believe to exist, and which he 
would not want to go to, if it did." 1 Doubt- 
less the symbols of the Book of Revelation, 
with its pearly gates and golden streets, its 
strange and monstrous animal figures, its em- 
phasis on ecstatic worship as the sole occu- 
pation of the heavenly world, in brief, its non- 
human quality of life, has had much to do with 
the present revolt against ecclesiastical teaching 
about a state of future existence. A singular 
confirmation of this judgment is supplied in 
the private letter of an American soldier who 
was a member of the Foreign Legion and who 
laid down his life in the war. He writes as 
follows : 

"Living as we do, with death as a constant com- 
panion, has but deepened my conviction of something j 
after this life. But it has destroyed my belief (what 
belief I may have had) in the conventional heaven 
and hell of theology. With all reverence, I can think 

1 B. H. Streeter in Essays on Immortality y p. 135. 



HINDRANCES TO BELIEF 61 

of nothing more deadly than an eternity devoted to 
singing, playing, and adoration. A man's soul must 
include his capacity for action, work, his creative 
faculties, I think; to me our power to imagine and 
create is one of the evidences of God in us. That, and 
the numbers of young men just on the threshold of 
their creative life — musicians, writers, painters — men 
who could look at a river and vision and build power 
plants and factories; yes, soldiers who could look at 
a map and vision armies in place and manoeuvring — 
these men, killed, utterly destroyed in a second by a 
few ounces of explosives, have made impossible the 
belief that all that their minds held is definitely lost 
to humanity. I believe that death is followed by life 
as sunset is followed by sunrise, but by a life much 
more closely related to this one than theological dogma 
would have us believe. ..." 

But other and deeper causes have been at 
work. 

To begin with, thoughtful persons have come 
to see that death has been overestimated. Its 
significance for man's spiritual history has oc- 
cupied too great a place in thought and feeling. 
How many earnest spirits like Dr. Johnson 
have all their lifetime lived under a dark cloud 
through the fear that death settled their moral 
status in the universe for all eternity ! Popular 
thought conceives of death as ushering in the 
soul to the presence of the Judge of all, there 



62 THE FUTURE LIFE 

to undergo trial and receive fit sentence. Thus 
death which is an episode in the physical order, 
a biological event, is transformed into a spirit- 
ual process, with resultant illusions and con- 
fusions both in thought and life. Yet a little 
reflection would show the unreality of this way 
of picturing the meaning of death. If here and 
now on "this bank and shoal of time" I am not 
in the presence of God, then nowhere through- 
out the entire cosmos can I ever find Him, or 
feel His eye upon me. Five minutes after death 
where am I? From the standpoint of spiritual 
reality, precisely where I was five minutes be- 
fore death. Doubtless death as a physical 
process, like all other physical processes, affects 
the life of the spirit, for it implies that the 
physical organism has been dropped, and that 
life is lived under new conditions. But it is one 
thing to say this and another and a very dif- 
ferent thing to say that a bodily event has 
power to work as by magic a profound trans- 
formation in all man's spiritual relationships, 
in the very texture of the soul-life. This is to 
assert what cannot stand the scrutiny of ethics 
or of science. The main significance of death 
lies in its power to change our environment. 
And when traditional theology passes beyond 
death and tries to forecast the history of the 



HINDRANCES TO BELIEF 63 

soul in the after-world, it forms a scheme or 
framework within which for ages the hopes 
and fears of men have moved, but from which 
the majority of educated people today turn 
away in utter disbelief. They cannot say 
with Dante that the pillars of an enduring 
Hell have been built upon the love and jus- 
tice of God. They do not believe in eternal 
torture, that is, in pain that has no meaning and 
no end, nor do they find credible, the resurrec- 
tion of the physical body, a final Day of Judg- 
ment on which human history will be finally 
wound up, to be followed by a static Heaven and 
Hell, or a Purgatory that is at once artificial 
and unethical. If the after-life is to be worthy 
of man's reverent trust and hope, it can only be 
by our applying to it those moral categories 
which have been found to work in our experi- 
ence here and now. One of these great forma- 
tive principles is that of growth. Man's person- 
ality is never a finished article ; it is a growing 
organism. Now to suppose that the world be- 
yond the grave is the scene of irrevocable woe 
or bliss in which a man enters at death is to 
suppose something that offends the moral sense, 
because it contradicts all that which our experi- 
ence in this world certifies. As Dr. James Ward 
remarks : "That a man should pass at once from 



64 THE FUTURE LIFE 

earth to heaven or hell seems irrational and 
inequitable ; and the lapse of ages of suspended 
consciousness, if this were conceivable, would 
not diminish this discontinuity. ? ' * Nor is the 
official doctrine of Purgatory in any better 
case. For this doctrine is not the rational and 
acceptable view of Plato which reappears in 
the teaching of such men as Clement of Alex- 
andria and Origen that the suffering in Purga- 
tory is disciplinary and is profitable for the 
correction of morally imperfect habits and for 
the purification from the stains contracted 
through the defilements of this life; it is the 
irrational and unacceptable theory that at death 
souls destined for Heaven are in the very in- 
stant of death morally transformed, wholly 
turned away from all evil and wholly given to 
all good, but pass into Purgatory for a space 
to expiate in pain the debt which they owe to 
justice of God for the sins committed in their 
fleshly life. These theories of popular religious 
thought, whether Roman or Protestant, are no 
longer possible to cultivated men, because they 
deny that the history of the soul is an organic 
development in which there is a continuity be- 
tween the higher and the lower stages of being, 
and in which spiritual progress is inconceivable 

1 The Realm of Ends, p. 406. 



HINDRANCES TO BELIEF 65 

apart from decisions and choices of the moral 
will. The most clamant need at the present time 
in the sphere of religion is a bold and vigorous 
effort at reconstructing the current conceptions 
of the future life, by sweeping as rubbish to the 
void the pictures and fallacies of Judaic imag- 
ination stimulated by Pagan thought, and by 
building a fresh and still more compelling and 
realistic view of man's destiny upon the teach- 
ing of Christ and of those who stood nearest 
Him in spirit, and upon the nature of man's 
higher life as disclosed by modern reflection. 
And those who reject belief in survival because- 
they no longer expect to hear the trumpet blast 
heralding the Last Day, or to see a great white 
throne with its apparitors of doom, or to emerge 
from the grave clad in a body which they had 
laid aside not without some measure of relief, 
may be reminded that faith in immortality was 
in possession ages before these thoughts entered 
the human mind, and therefore can exist when 
they have passed into the limbo of oblivion. 



II. THE RISE AND INFLUENCE OF SCIENTIFIC 
MATERIALISM 

Materialism or the doctrine that all phe- 
nomena, whether physical or psychical, are 



66 THE FUTURE LIFE 

phenomena of matter in motion, has behind it 
a long history, going back to the speculations 
of the ancient Greek philosophers, Empedocles 
and Democritus, and finding its poet in the 
Roman Lucretius, whose motive in writing his 
On the Nature of Things was to free men 
from the fear of Orcus with its eternal gloom 
and suffering, by showing that the soul, made 
of attenuated matter, vanished when its constit- 
uent particles were dissolved. In the nineteenth 
century Tyndall startled his contemporaries by 
his assertion that in matter was to be discerned 
"the promise and potency of every form and 
quality of life." The history of the universe 
has been the history of atoms in motion, and 
within these atoms lie all the forces that create 
light, heat, electricity, and so forth, each being 
convertible into the rest. Everything that has 
come to be, mental or physical, lay germinally in 
the primeval atom. The modern phase of the 
doctrine substitutes units of electricity for the 
hard atoms of the older thinkers. But this does 
not alter the essence of the argument. These 
ultimate entities constitute the stuff of which 
the universe is made. The concentration of so 
many brilliant minds on the physical sciences, 
and the resultant emphasis on the mechanical 



HINDRANCES TO BELIEF 67 

aspect of nature, combined with the revolution- 
ary doctrine of Darwin which seemed to com- 
plete the materialistic argument by the proof 
that man has been developed by an endless 
number of minute variations in virtue of the 
law of natural selection from his pre-human 
ancestry, threatened to sweep the last genera- 
tion off its feet and to make materialism trium- 
phant among all educated people. But idealism 
in a variety of forms during the past quarter 
of a century has, it is claimed, turned the tide, 
and on all sides we are assured that materialism 
is dead or dying, at most dragging out a pre- 
carious existence in quarters innocent of philo- 
sophical speculation, and ignorant of the real 
situation in the higher thought of our time. A 
lecturer in connection with the Ethical Culture 
Movement has recently told us that "no longer 
is it left to theology to decry materialism. 
Science herself has sounded its death-knell. 
Today it is difficult to find a genuinely scien- 
tific champion of its thesis as it was fifty years 
ago to find an opponent. ' ' * An Anglican the- 
ologian in a book just published assures us that 
"materialism is a ' creed outworn.' Fifty years 
ago, when physical science was making such 

1 Faith m a Future Life, by A. Martin, p. 44. 



68 THE FUTURE LIFE 

rapid advances, it was fashionable. Today it 
has ceased to be fashionable and is thoroughly 
discredited." * 

The writer of the article on " Materialism" in 
Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy and Psy- 
chology avers that "materialism as a dogmatic 
system hardly survives in philosophical circles, 
although in alliance with Secularism it is no 
doubt influential among certain sections of the 
working classes and often forms the creed of 
the half-educated specialist." 2 "In dogmatic 
form," writes Dr. F. E. Tennant, "materialism 
is to be found today, perhaps, only in the litera- 
ture of secularist 'free' thought. Even the 
monism of E. Haeckel which is materialism in 
all but name, awakes no enthusiasm among 
scientific students in Britain, and is rightly re- 
garded as involving an obsolete standpoint." 
There can be no doubt that these writers are 
serious thinkers who not only believe what they 
say, but have grounds for their belief. Yet it 
is no less certain that materialism was never 
more rampant in scientific circles than it is 
today. It was an ancient saying that when 
three physicians met, two were always found 



1 Christianity and Immortality, by V. Storr, p. 23. 

2 Hastings' Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. Art. 
Materialism. 



HINDRANCES TO BELIEF 69 

to be atheists; substitute the word "material- 
ists" for "atheists" and you will not be far 
from the truth. Owing to the ill odour now 
attaching to materialism as though it involved 
a certain moral approbrium, scientific men do 
not care to label themselves with the name, but 
that they are firmly persuaded of the doctrine 
and teach it to the youth who attend our 
medical schools may be reckoned as certain. 
"Almost any of our young psychologists will 
tell you," says James, "that only a few be- 
lated scholastics or possibly some crack-brained 
theosophist or psychical researcher can be 
found holding back, and still talking as if mental 
phenomena might exist as independent vari- 
ables in the world. ' ' * But the matter has been 
recently put to the test in a genuinely scien- 
tific style. Professor J. H. Leuba sent out a 
questionnaire to groups selected from pub- 
lished lists of American scientists and psy- 
chologists, and philosophers, with a view to 
discover how far the belief in God and immor- 
tality still prevailed among the educated classes, 
more particularly in college and university 
circles. Of those who answered the questions 
it was found that 49.4 per cent., among the 
physical and biological scientists taken to- 

1 Human Immortality^ pp. 9, 10. 



70 THE FUTURE LIFE 

gether, declared themselves either disbelievers 
or doubters in regard to belief in immortality. 
Of the more eminent as distinguished from men 
of lesser reputation, only 36.9 proclaimed them- 
selves believers. The biologists produced a 
smaller number of believers than the physi- 
cists, 50 per cent, being credited to the former, 
57 per cent, to the latter. Of the men of 
greater standing among the biologists only 
25 per cent, avowed their belief in a future 
life. Another interesting and significant fact 
emerged. Whereas among the physicists and 
biologists the number of believers in immor- 
tality was substantially larger than that of the 
believers in God, among the psychologists the 
number of believers in immortality was clearly 
less than that of the believers in God, 24 per 
cent, asserting their belief in God, and 19.8 per 
cent, their belief in immortality. Among the 
greater psychologists the number of believers 
in immortality sinks to 8.8 per cent. Professor 
Leuba concludes that "in the present phase of 
psychological science, the greater one's knowl- 
edge of psychic life the more difficult it is to 
retain the traditional belief in the continuation 
of personality after death. " To put the results 
of the investigation briefly, more than half of 
.all those who replied to the questions addressed 



HINDRANCES TO BELIEF 71 

to them and over two-thirds of the more eminent 
of these rejected belief in immortality. 1 These 
ascertained facts prove that the reassuring ut- 
terances of men of philosophical distinction as 
to the passing of materialism require critical 
discrimination. Inquiry and statistical study 
prove the prevalence of denial of survival in 
scientific circles as the result of psycho-physio- 
logical knowledge implying materialism, and yet 
sincere and thoughtful men assure us that this 
doctrine is thoroughly discredited except among 
the half-educated and scientific amateurs. 

How is this apparent contradiction to be ex- 
plained? The answer is that the term "ma- 
terialism" is ambiguous and covers ideas that 
have no intrinsic connection. Materialism as a 
theory of knowledge has been vanquished by 
idealism and may be said to be dead, but 
materialism as a psycho-physiological solution 
of the problem of mind and brain was never 
more alive in scientific circles than it is today. 
The old doctrine that nothing is in mind except 
what enters through the senses w r as shown to 
be false by proving that mind had powers which 
the senses were not adequate to explain. The 

1 The Belief in God and Immortality ', by James H. Leuba, 
pp. 173-281. Dr. Leuba was unable to get any reliable results 
from his inquiries in philosophical quarters, as he was unable 
to formulate his questions in such a way as to get from the 
philosophers clear answers. 



72 THE FUTURE LIFE 

intellect can rise above the individual percep- 
tions and can grasp them as an intelligible 
whole. Such an act may well be called "crea- 
tive" — an act quite impossible to the senses. 
Sensationalism, then, has vanished from the 
realm of debate, and in that sense materialism 
has had its day and has ceased to be. But the 
scientific materialist does not wince at this 
philosophic victory. For he is not concerned 
about the nature of knowledge ; such a problem 
he hands over to the metaphysician. What con- 
cerns him is to frame an hypothesis, in harmony 
with scientific method, which will render intel- 
ligible the relation of mind to the bodily organ- 
ism. And this hypothesis can be expressed in 
a sentence — consciousness is a function of the 
brain. It cannot be denied that the normal facts 
are on the materialistic side. Universal experi- 
ence testifies that consciousness is always asso- 
ciated with a physical organism, weakens when 
the organism weakens, is impaired when the 
organism is impaired, and finally disappears 
when the organism perishes under the stroke of 
death. It is true that the materialist cannot 
prove that consciousness is destroyed by 
death, but why, he asks, should consciousness 
persist when the other functions, the various 
chemistries of the body, are stilled forever? 



HINDRANCES TO BELIEF 73 

Now that the full strength of the negative 
argument may appear, it may be well to hear 
what some of its champions have to say 
in its defence. "If an individual feeling al- 
ways goes with an individual nerve-message, 
if a combination or stream of feelings 
always goes with a stream of nerve-messages, 
does it not follow that when the stream of 
nerve-messages is broken up, this stream of 
feelings will be broken up also, and will no 
longer form consciousness?" 1 Haeckel points 
to the discovery that in the grey matter of 
the brain are located not only the seats of the 
central sense-organs, the spheres of touch, 
smell, sense, and hearing, but between these the 
great organs of mental life, the highest instru- 
ments of psychic activity that produce thought 
and consciousness, 2 and throughout his discus- 
sion he assumes as not open to dispute that 
when this complex mechanism ceases to func- 
tion, all mental activity perishes. That the 
organization of mind advances with even pace 
along with the organization of brain, is the 
merest commonplace. The fortunes of mind 
and brain are so interwoven at every moment 
that to the scientific observer it is incredible to 

1 Clifford, Essays and Lectures, Vol. I, pp. 247-249. 

2 Riddle of the Universe, p. 65. 



74 THE FUTURE LIFE 

suppose the escape of consciousness from the 
shattered elements of the physical organ. The 
general thesis of the mind's dependence on the 
body is buttressed in detail by the researches of 
the physiologist and the psychologist. "The 
phenomena of consciousness correspond, ele- 
ment for element, to the operations of special 
parts of the brain. . . . The destruction of any 
piece of the apparatus involves the loss of some 
one or other of the vital operations; and the 
consequence is that as far as life extends, we 
have before us only an organic function, with a 
Ding-an-sich, or an expression of that imagi- 
nary entity, the soul. The fundamental propo- 
sition . . . carries with it the denial of the 
immortality of the soul." 1 

Now the point to be emphasized is that the 
brain is a highly complex structure in which a 
vast number of molecules are worked up into 
cells with all their marvellous ramifications, 
that with the break-up of this composite struc- 
ture mind no longer exists. Consciousness ap- 
pears with a physical complex called brain and 
is never known to function apart from it. Must 
not consciousness disappear when this complex 
is dissolved? As John Fiske writes : "We have 



1 G. E. Diihring, quoted by W. James, Human Immortality, 
p. 50. 



HINDRANCES TO BELIEF 75 

no more warrant in experience for supposing 
consciousness to exist without a nervous system 
than we have for supposing the properties of 
water to exist in a world destitute of hydrogen 
and oxygen. ' ' * 

It must be confessed that the answers made 
to this contention are far from satisfactory. 
The familiar argument of idealism, that mat- 
ter is not an independent something prior 
to thought, but is real only in so far as 
it appears to mind, so that, if you abstract 
mind from matter, matter ceases to be — 
this argument appears to the scientific ma- 
terialist to be a mere metaphysical puzzle or 
quibble, and he takes his stand on the principle 
that for practical purposes reality is directly 
perceived. The idealist's reasoning seems an 
airy nothing when confronted with the world of 
objective facts. Hence, to meet the new situa- 
tion the materialist is pointed to the elements of 
mental and moral experience. No physical 
facts, it is maintained, can explain moral values 
and ideals. The higher the stage in human 
evolution the more clearly appear in experience 
principles which imply that man has other and 
more vital interests than the maintenance of his 
physical existence. As a rational, self-conscious 

1 Everlasting Life, p. 55. 



76 THE FUTURE LIFE 

being, the shaper of his destiny, and the focus, 
so to say, of values that cannot be measured by 
any material standard, man stands outside the 
realm of mechanical necessity, and is not ex- 
plicable in terms of brain molecules and nerve 
elements. This argument has been set forth 
with impressive eloquence and powerful dia- 
lectic in the writings of Professor Ward and 
Professor Pringle-Pattison. But much as it 
appeals to the student of ethics and philosophy, 
it fails to persuade the scientific materialist. 
For the demand of the student of physiology is 
for facts, observed phenomena which may com- 
pel him to modify his thesis of the mind's func- 
tional dependence on the body. In the absence 
of these facts, his hypothesis holds the ground, 
and no assertion of man's moral and spiritual 
dignity will avail. But the curious and startling 
feature of the present situation is that the 
idealist acts as if he suspected that he had 
achieved only a dubious victory over his an- 
tagonist. For, of course, materialism denies 
immortality, and if idealism had really inflicted 
ruinous defeat on its antagonist, would not the 
idealist joyously proclaim to the world the fact 
of survival, and bid all men rejoice with him in 
the sure and certain hope that death is not the 
end! As a matter of fact, the idealist draws no 



HINDRANCES TO BELIEF 77 

such inference in the great majority of cases. 
On the contrary, he warns us that undue em- 
phasis on a future life augurs an unhealthy 
spiritual temperament; that, at best, the belief 
is secondary and inferential, and might even 
disappear, leaving all ethical and religious in- 
terests unaffected! The scientific materialist 
may well smile as he sees the impasse in which 
the philosopher finds himself, and he goes on his 
way, more than ever convinced that philosophy 
is a will-o'-the-wisp, and that for him the path 
of wisdom is that of observed fact, and induc- 
tive method. 

Out of this deadlock there is only one way. 
It is to refute the materialist by giving him 
what he professes to crave, that is to say, facts 
open to observation and experiment, just like 
the other facts which have created his negation. 
These facts are phenomena which go to prove 
that consciousness can function apart from the 
brain. For men of unscientific temper or of 
sternly ethical and religious instincts, such a 
proof may not be necessary, though, perhaps, 
desirable, but for the man who devotes his life 
to the study of brain states and corresponding 
mental states, in health and disease, facts alone 
have coercive power. Doubts created by science 
can be solved only by science. Hence to this 



78 THE FUTURE LIFE 

extent the problem of immortality is now a 
scientific one, and psychical research appears to 
be the only serious effort to face the situation. 
Only by the slow and tedious accumulation of 
facts tending to show that mind works inde- 
pendently of the physical organism, can the 
scientific materialist be met on his own ground, 
and be compelled to surrender. It is highly 
significant that the latest defender l of the ma- 
terialistic denial of immortality admits the 
reality of the phenomena of psychic research, 
but refers them to telepathic communication be- 
tween living persons, apparently forgetting that 
this is to explain the obscure by the more ob- 
scure. Nevertheless the admission is interest- 
ing ; it is likely to prove the first rift in the rock- 
ribbed dogmatism of modern materialism. 

III. THE INFLUENCE OF MODERN SOCIALISM 

Perhaps no movement of the nineteenth cen- 
tury has been more potent in the life of vast 
masses of men than the rise and spread of 
socialism. Its most logical form is that of 
scientific socialism as expounded by Karl Marx. 
To the strict Marxian, socialism is not merely 
an economic doctrine ; it is a philosophy of life 
and all its relationships. Speaking at the grave 

1 E. S. P. Haynes in Belief m Immortality, 



HINDRANCES TO BELIEF 79 

of Marx, his friend and co-worker, Engels, ex- 
plained the Marxian "materialistic conception 
of history' ' to mean that the given "stage of 
economic evolution of a nation or epoch forms 
the foundation from which the civil institutions 
of the people in question, their ideas of law, of 
art, of religion even, have been developed and 
according to which they are to be explained — 
and not the reverse, as has been done hitherto." 
Strict Marxians, therefore, reject belief in im- 
mortality on the ground that it is merely a 
reflection of the economic situation of the people 
among whom it appears. With the establish- 
ment of the socialistic Utopia, the idea will 
wholly vanish. To be sure, all socialists are 
not out-and-out Marxians. Indeed the average 
socialist, strange to say, is an unmitigated in- 
dividualist in religion, holding apparently that 
while all other human motives and institutions 
are capable of being socialized, the deepest 
motive of all has no sociological function what- 
ever ! Unquestionably, the general trend of the 
movement has been to conceive of man too much 
as an economic, money-grabbing, food-getting 
animal. The wage-earner is engaged in the 
struggle for an existence. To him the things of 
pressing moment are food, clothing, shelter, 
houses, land. Socialism has shown him that 



80 THE FUTURE LIFE 

these things depend on far-reaching interna- 
tional and financial conditions. In opposition to 
the teaching of many religious bodies that the 
supreme concern is the salvation of the soul, 
which is quite independent of material condi- 
tions, socialism tends to the other extreme and 
so emphasizes the improvement of external con- 
ditions as to obscure the inner meaning of man's 
being, his power to transcend circumstance, "to 
live a life beyond, to have a hope to die with 
dim-descried. " The life beyond the grave can 
offer no economic return ; therefore, it must be 
denied or relegated to the realm of the negli- 
gible. ' ' When we have attained the good things 
of this world," as Goethe observed, "it is so 
easy to regard those of the next as a delusion 
and a snare." Moreover, the struggle for a 
redistribution of earthly goods and for a larger 
opportunity to get out of the present world what 
is in it, is so absorbing and exciting that any 
interest in the supersensuous realm distracts 
the attention from the real things, the solid and 
substantial realities of economics. In other 
words, as has been well said, "man is to be no 
longer, even in his holiday dreamings, an am- 
phibious creature, longing somehow for the 
boundless ocean, but he is to be simply and 
exclusively a land-animal, a creature of earth 



HINDRANCES TO BELIEF 81 

alone.' ' The economic interests of the pro- 
letariat loom so large as to eclipse the vision 
of another world. Moreover, socialism offers 
itself as a substitute for the religion with which 
so many of the wage-earning class have broken 
in our time. It holds up the ideal of a social- 
istic state as an object worthy of reverence, 
commanding the utter devotion of our lives and 
the suppression of all other desires and ambi- 
tions. Now, as belief in immortality has become 
an essential element in religion as Western 
peoples know it, it is obvious that the growth 
of the socialistic idea has been hostile to its hold 
on large classes of the industrial populations of 
the world. 

The remedy lies in a twofold direction. The 
believer in immortality must show that his faith 
is not only compatible with but essential to a 
genuine reverence for whatever bears on man's 
best life. And he must prove his faith by prov- 
ing his interest in the material well-being, the 
readjustment of social conditions, the provision 
of a larger economic and educational oppor- 
tunity for the unprivileged masses. Any pre- 
occupation with the other world which curtails 
our interest in establishing the Kingdom of God 
wherein each shall work according to his ability, 
and to each shall be given according to his 



82 THE FUTURE LIFE 

needs, will in the long run react harmfully on 
our conviction that not here but beyond must 
the destiny of man find its consummation. 

And, on the other hand, the socialist must be 
led to see that the implications of his creed are 
deeper than he suspects. No programme of 
economic reform, no acceleration of material- 
istic dreams, can satisfy the spiritual ambitions 
of the human spirit that has once realized the 
import of liberty, equality, brotherhood, and 
caught a glimpse of the new world wherein 
dwelleth righteousness. Such a belief is really 
mystical in character. For man is now seen to 
belong to a grander order than that of earth; he 
is the focus of eternal values; he escapes our 
economic categories and stands forth in his true 
being as the citizen of a transcendent world 
who here and now is passing through a prepara- 
tory discipline and after each task is done, is 
haunted by a divine unrest that urges him on to 
find his goal beyond the limitations of his ter- 
restrial lot. It is paradoxical but true that the 
more super-earthly man appears to be, the more 
sacred become all his temporal interests and 
strivings. 



CHAPTER V 

THE MORAL. ARGUMENT 

The argument which we are now about to dis- 
cuss has, perhaps, more than any other, made 
widespread and permanent appeal. When all 
other reasonings have proved but broken reeds, 
the argument based on the nature of man as a 
moral being has afforded a rational foundation 
from which faith might make its venture. It 
has also the singular merit of being the one 
argument on which such a speculative genius as 
Immanuel Kant was willing to stake the eternal 
hopes of humanity. The form, indeed, in which 
he propounded it is no longer acceptable; it 
shares in the doctrinaire and abstract quality of 
eighteenth century thought. "From the moral 
law implied in the practical reason, " says Kant, 
"comes a demand for an ultimate harmony be- 
tween happiness and virtue ; but this harmony 
is unattainable in this life, owing to man's 
fleshly weakness, therefore there must be a life 
after death where man may find an opportunity 
for the achievement of his endless task." 

83 



84 THE FUTURE LIFE 

Translate this into modern language and it 
means that nature imposes on every man the 
duty of realizing the ideal of his life, but this 
ideal is really infinite in scope. The more it is 
pursued, the further it seems to fly before us. 
It is an everlasting task to which man by the 
very constitution of his being is committed. 
Now a universe in which the moral ideal sets 
up such a claim must give sufficient space for 
man to fulfil it in a world perfectly harmonious 
with it. Such an opportunity is denied the 
servant of the ideal if death ends all. It is, 
therefore, an ethical necessity that death, so far 
from ending all, should prove a pathway into 
a more abundant, completer, and richer life. 
When certain dubious elements which have 
been associated with the argument have been 
cleared away, it can be stated in a form which 
still carries a large measure of conviction to 
those possessed of healthy ethical instincts. 
Too often an undue emphasis has been placed 
on future rewards and punishments, as though 
virtue were a sort of prudential insurance 
against the possibilities of woe in a future 
world. Nowadays, we have come to see that 
a good life is intrinsically good and an evil life 
is intrinsically evil apart from any consequences 
whatever ; and we are called to realize goodness 



THE MORAL ARGUMENT 85 

in thought and conduct without an eye to any 
ulterior benefits. Of two men, one who avoids 
evil from fear of consequences or hope of re- 
ward is, we feel, inferior morally to him who 
says, "I will do what is right because my con- 
science and reason tell me it is right, and I will 
do it without regard to any external reward 
whatever because the very doing of it satisfies 
my nature." Five centuries before Christ, a 
great Oriental teacher proclaimed the necessity 
of renouncing the idea of performing right 
deeds from the motive of winning heaven and 
avoiding hell, if one were to be really virtuous. 
It is to be feared that there are multitudes that 
have not as yet learned the lesson of the ancient 
sage. 

Moreover, the theory which would divide the 
moral life into two sections, the first of which 
is the performance of moral actions in the pres- 
ent world, and the second the obtaining of 
rewards in the world to come in return for 
these actions, must give way to the deeper view 
that the present life and the future life are one. 
The results of our actions here and now are 
realized. The sinner in the very act of violating 
his own nature automatically inflicts grievous 
loss upon himself; a good man in the very act 
of obeying conscience and reason is gaining 



86 THE FUTURE LIFE 

enlargement of being, a stronger and richer 
personality. 

And yet at the root of the popular idea is a 
truth with which we cannot dispense. It is this 
— if goodness is to claim our wholehearted devo- 
tion, even to the length of our being willing in 
its interest to sacrifice the physical life, the de- 
mand of the soul is that goodness must be 
worth while. What rational ground for a truly 
moral action could there be, if its fruition in 
an enhanced personality with all its further 
possibilities were at the mercy of an external 
and alien power such as death? Motives of 
prudence or utilitarian considerations would 
still be possible, but the prudential and the truly 
moral are poles asunder. Tennyson has gone 
to the heart of the matter when he says of 
virtue : 

"She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of 
the just, 
To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a summer 

sky: 
Give her the wages of going on, and not to die." 

The true motives which enter into and! 
spiritualize a longing for a future life are, as 
has been well said, "that personal affection may 



THE MOEAL ARGUMENT 87 

continue and that moral goodness may grow." 
However many be the links that bind man to 
the lower creation, there is one quality which 
lifts him out of the animal world and puts him 
in a category by himself. It is his power to 
form and cherish ideals. These ideals, though 
ever changing, are also permanent ; they are the 
shaping and determining forces of life. But if 
the limits set by man's earthly fate arrest his 
progress, death falls as a blight on all the 
promise of his nature. For the full unfolding 
of his powers he needs a world of larger scope 
than this. What kind of a universe would it be 
if such an opportunity were denied? Would it 
be possible to acquit it of cruelty and injustice? 
Hence, before we ask, Is man immortal? it is 
necessary to ask, What is man? Is he a merely 
natural phenomenon to be identified with the 
sum-total of his natural impulses? If so, the 
verdict against survival is already given. If 
man is inextricably implicated in the life of 
nature, he shares the destiny of nature. But the 
analysis of the human spirit discloses the pres- 
ence of powers and capacities which have no 
meaning for man conceived simply as a member 
of a biological series; the roots of his being 
strike deep into a spiritual and transcendental 
world. If man is only a terrestrial being 



88 THE FUTURE LIFE 

whose history is confined to threescore years 
and ten, why all those gifts and aptitudes, 
those ideal-forming powers by which he tran- 
scends these limits, in virtue of which he can 
resurrect the buried past or lay the founda- 
tions upon which to build the fabric of the 
future? There is no relation between his short 
earthly history and the magnificence of his 
mental and moral endowments. The ideal set 
before him is the perfection of all his powers, 
the realization of his true selfhood, and this 
ideal demands fulfilment. As he progresses 
in experience and the good for which he strives 
ceases to be material, it takes the form more 
and more of a spiritual self. This idealism is 
not an accident; it belongs to the inmost essence 
of his being. From this point of view we can 
see that man does not need to wait for death, 
in order to be ushered into the immortal life. 
He is already a citizen of an eternal world and 
his every act is the act of a person to whom 
death is an irrelevance. 

Now here is the strange paradox; this " finite- 
infinite " being is set in a world which hedges 
him in on every side, mocks at his enthusiasm, 
and pours contempt on all the flights of his 
idealizing imagination. Hence the tragic pathos 
of human existence. Man is beset behind and 



THE MORAL ARGUMENT 89 

before by forces that deny the possibility of 
realization of his ideals. Consider the fact that 
about one-sixth of all who are born die before 
reason begins to unfold itself. Think of it, that 
myriads start life already handicapped in body 
or in mind, or in both; that even the few who 
have every gift that nature and heredity and 
circumstance can bestow are yet at the mercy of 
a thousand adverse influences and know well 
that they have scarcely learned the first neces- 
sary lessons before their time is up and they 
pass, leaving behind them only hints of what 
they might have done. "Man goes to his 
grave," says Bossuet, "dragging the chain of 
his broken hopes." Has not our own time 
brought home to us this thought as never be- 
fore? Think of the millions of youths cut off 
in the springtime of their lives, having scarcely 
had time to do more than reveal the presence of 
capacity, the promise of what might have been. 
The fragmentariness of life, its tragic inade- 
quacy to meet the most clamant needs of the 
soul, the fact that our most precious possessions 
are at the mercy of the accidental and the un- 
preventable — all this has no meaning except in 
the light of man's persistent conviction that he 
belongs by nature to another world; that this 
other world is his true home and destiny. 



90 THE FUTURE LIFE 

From another point of view, we are led to the 
same conclusion. The only ideal worthy of man 
as a rational being is the ideal of moral perfec- 
tion. He is committed by the necessities of his 
nature to a struggle — a struggle in very truth 
for his soul. But his striving is never finished ; 
it is an endless process. As a given duty is 
performed, as an inspiration born of insight is 
realized in practice, new obligations are laid 
upon the will, nay, the more we advance in 
spiritual experience the more clearly we see the 
chasm between the ideal and the fulfilment. A 
St. Paul can cry out, "0 wretched man that I 
am! who shall deliver me?" And again, "Not 
as though I had already attained, either were 
already perfect, but I follow on." 

In every man there are two selves — a better 
and a worse. The worse self is created out of 
instinct and sense, the better self out of intellect 
and moral will. It is the duty of every man to 
make the former subservient to the latter, to 
find in intellectual and moral activity the true 
sphere of his desires and aspirations, but this 
task is infinite. How is he to achieve it, if the 
limits of his earthly lot mark all the time at his 
disposal? And if he does not achieve it, is there 
a sadder tragedy imaginable? Everywhere else 
in the organic realm, there is a proportion be- 



THE MORAL ARGUMENT 91 

tween a creature's capacities and the scope of 
its life. Why is man doomed to incompleteness? 
It has been said, indeed, that if one took a fair 
and dispassionate view of one's moral short- 
comings, the thought of another life wherein 
these would reappear might seem far from a 
thing to be desired. In order to disenchant 
man of the hopes of a future after death, 
writers have painted him in colours drawn from 
the weaker and baser side of his history and yet 
man feels that there is a residual capacity, a 
reserve of moral force, if only it could be set 
free, strong to regenerate, to build anew the city 
of his dreams. Who has not heard the pathetic 
cry of many a sorrowful spirit, "If I had my 
life to live over again, what a different man I 
would be?" What if it should turn out that 
beyond death there awaits us a new opportunity 
in another environment to make good the fail- 
ures which here we deplore? 

When we turn to the affectional side of 
human nature, we find in harmony with the 
greater poets of all time a principle which is 
ultimate and for the satisfaction of which only 
a boundless future seems adequate. It is the 
principle of love. This feeling alone gives value 
to life's experiences. But the very essence of 
love lies in personal relationships. Now death 



92 THE FUTURE LIFE 

puts an end to these relationships. What then 
becomes of love and what of the worth of life 
dependent on love? It may be said that if death 
takes one friend, life can give us another. But 
where love has been truly spiritual, implying the 
deepest and most vital communion, nothing can 
take its place. Love is not transferable ; it finds 
in the being loved a uniqueness, an individual- 
ity, a something that cannot be transcended by 
any other object or being. "The whole conduct 
of men," writes Professor Coe, "shows that 
the personal-social relationships that they most 
value they do desire to continue. One does not 
willingly lose friend A, even if one is convinced 
that an equally good friend B is ready to take 
A's place. Love individualizes the object to 
which it attaches itself, so that something of the 
value is lost if the individual perishes." 1 If 
death brings final destruction of personal rela- 
tionships, then love, using the word in its 
highest sense, makes demands and by its very 
nature sets up claims which are incompatible 
with the necessities of our earthly lot. 

And here it may be worth while to point out 
that if men value mainly the other life because 
of the possibility it offers for the renewal of 
those social relationships which death dissolves, 

1 The Psychology of Religion, p. 295. 



THE MORAL ARGUMENT 93 

we must reverse the popular judgment as to the 
relative superiority of the pursuit of knowledge 
over the activity of the affections. To know the 
world without and the world within is a noble 
ambition, but to love our brothers is still nobler. 
We are justified in asserting that the full possi- 
bilities of man's nature can be realized only in 
proportion as he enters into the joys and re- 
sponsibilities of an associated life. The history 
of the past, the long story of the development 
of civilization confirms the judgment expressed 
by man in his desire, because of social reasons, 
for immortality, and both assert that the highest 
act of man is to love and serve his fellows. It 
is needless to add that this idea is revolution- 
ary in character. Once it is realized all our 
social problems are solved. Classism and 
pseudo-nationalism and war vanish from the 
earth and a pure democracy is at last set up 
among men. 

It will be found that as a rule men of strong 
ethical instincts cherish the conviction that 
somehow beyond death an opportunity will be 
given them to go on with the work of soul- 
making, of realizing possibilities which here on 
earth have only begun to reveal themselves. 
This unconquerable intuition or feeling seizes 
those who have surrendered to the spell of the 



94 THE FUTURE LIFE 

ideal, who strive after spiritual perfection. But 
this ideal can never be satisfied. As the years 
pass, it grows wider and wider and death steps 
in to arrest the soul's upward progress and ap- 
parently to put to confusion all its endeavour. 
If the universe is more than a soulless machine 
grinding out life and death with grim indif- 
ference, if it is at heart moral, we must believe 
that its highest creature and revealer — man — 
will have the chance to pursue his spiritual task, 
to work out his destiny, to achieve the end for 
which nature designed him. Every one who has 
entered on the higher life knows that all the 
moral phenomena which he has as yet produced 
have failed to exhaust his capacities or to 
express fully his personality. There are depths 
within depths, dormant energies which even in 
this life, under fit stimulus, at times awake 
and with revolutionary violence transform 
thought, affection, desire. "Within every 
man's thought," says Emerson, "is a higher 
thought ; within the character he exhibits today, 
a higher character." And if man's nature is 
thus a constant process of evolution, shall death 
stay the onward march of the spirit and pro- 
claim the mastery of matter over all moral 
values? If so, we must believe that we are 
living in a universe governed by unreason. 

V 



THE MORAL ARGUMENT 95 

There can be no doubt that the argument out- 
lined above has considerable weight and must 
command the sympathy of all who reflect upon 
the meaning and purpose of life. Our deepest 
experience is our moral experience. In it we 
must believe there is a revelation of ultimate 
truth and this experience demands a future life 
as its necessary presupposition. Yet it must be 
confessed that the argument labours under some 
weaknesses which impair its value as a demon- 
stration. Clearly it rests on a philosophical 
faith— the faith that at bottom the universe is 
a rational whole based throughout on ethical 
principles which we can read for ourselves. 
Else there is no guarantee that the moral de- 
mand of man's nature will be satisfied. But 
this faith in essential morality of the universe 
seems to rest upon another faith — faith in God, 
the Eternal Ground of all existence, Whose 
moral perfections are to be discerned in nature 
and humanity. Then comes the doubt whether 
the world as we know it presents a scene where 
only benevolence, love, goodness, and the vari- 
ous attributes that we call divine may be seen, 
and thus the foundation of our argument seems 
infected with a misgiving. It may be true that 
"He who has seen the sea and the blue of 
heaven and the moon and the stars, who has 



96 THE FUTURE LIFE 

climbed a mountain, who has heard a bird in 
the woods, who has known a mother — he will 
bow his knee and thank his God and call life 
good, even though his lot in the end be nothing- 
ness ;" x yet we cannot forbear asking: what of 
the multitudes who have never known these 
aesthetic and social joys, who have never tasted 
'of happiness but who have drunk to the dregs 
the cup of misery all through the weary years ? 
Will you tell these to bow the knee and offer a 
prayer of thanks to the Power that has placed 
them here, if this be the full portion assigned 
them? It may well be that in order to vindicate 
the universe as rational, or, in religious terms, 
to justify God at the bar of human intelligence 
as perfectly good, we must first of all prove im- 
mortality. A new world must be called in to 
redress the balance of the old. 

But there is another and a still more serious 
drawback; our reasoning here is based on the 
belief that the universe will preserve what is 
valuable, all else being cast on the dust heap. 
This argument is strong as applied to the case 
of all who have entered upon the higher life and 
who have begun to taste some of its experiences. 

1 J. H. Stirling, quoted by A. S. Pringle-Pattison in The 
Idea of God, p. 45. 



THE MORAL ARGUMENT 97 

These may well claim the right of continuance 
as elements of value in the moral world. But 
what of those who have never risen one step 
above the animal life? What of the depraved, 
flung into a world that owns them not, the chil- 
dren of a base heredity reared in filthy sur- 
roundings, breathing from birth an atmosphere 
poisoned with the fumes of sin and shame? 
What of the victims of alcohol, morphine, co- 
caine, who cry for freedom from a slavery that 
too often circumstance and hereditary weakness 
have made inevitable? Can the universe refuse 
to hear their cry and will it coldly decline to 
give them another chance, even though they are 
realized worth less than nothing? In shuf- 
fling off this mortal coil must they not shuffle 
off existence itself as valueless to God and man? 
So it would seem and yet a protest arises up 
within us that cannot be silenced. What if even 
in these misguided souls there are possibilities 
thwarted here which may well blossom into 
virtue and honour hereafter? It is hard — nay, 
we must hold it is impossible — to kill the divine 
life, to quench the spark increate in the human 
soul. Prince Kropotkin tells a story in Mutual 
Aid as a Factor in Evolution of a French con- 
vict who escaped from prison. He lay concealed 



98 THE FUTURE LIFE 

all night in a ditch close by a small village, 
probably intending to steal something to help 
him on his way. As he was lying in the ditch a 
fire broke out in the village. He saw a woman 
run out of one of the burning houses, and heard 
her piercing cries for help to save a child in the 
upper story. The escaped prisoner dashed out 
of his retreat, made his way through the fire, and 
with scalded face and burning clothes, brought 
the child safely out and restored him to his 
mother. The village officials had him arrested 
and returned to prison. Kropotkin speaks of 
the act as the result of an impulse of the natural 
man, and not to be attributed to any inspiration 
of "divine grace.' ' But the "natural man" is 
an abstraction. He has never been seen any- 
where except in the pages of theologians and 
philosophers, and he could not appear even 
there were it not that all that is divine in the 
real man is left out of account. If self-sacrifice 
at the risk of the natural, physical life is not 
divine, then there is nothing divine anywhere in 
the realm of human experience. But hope for 
the lost is only possible, if we can ascribe to the 
universe, or rather to the Power that rules 
within it, everlasting compassion, never-failing 
goodness. But here again to justify this belief 
must it not be that we must prove that this 



THE MORAL ARGUMENT 99 

world is only the vestibule of another and a 
greater world where saving and redeeming 
forces may be brought into play for the good of 
those whom nature and man have treated so 
harshly? 



CHAPTER VI 

JESUS CHRIST AND THE FUTURE LIFE 

The apparent silence of the Founder of Chris- 
tianity concerning another life has often been 
commented on as strange and enigmatic. Some 
have gone so far as to say that, like Buddha, He 
was an agnostic on all matters that lay beyond 
the earthly horizon, and had no word of wisdom 
to offer mankind in answer to its eternal ques- 
tion. "It is strange," says Emerson, "that 
Jesus is esteemed by mankind the Bringer of 
the doctrine of immortality. He is never weak 
or sentimental; He is very abstemious of ex- 
planation. He never preaches the personal im- 
mortality." 1 Yet it is this Man who has so 
quickened the thought of immortality, so 
brought it home to the human heart that for 
all time His religion is bound up with the asser- 
tion that the soul has within it the power of an 
endless life. Here is indeed a puzzling paradox. 
Only a parable or two, and a few scattered say- 
ings on the great theme are all that have come 

1 Works, vol. viii, p. 330. 

100 



JESUS CHRIST AND FUTUEE LIFE 101 

down to us, and yet immortality becomes one of 
the great regulative or pivotal ideas of Chris- 
tian thought from the apostolic age to modern 
times! How is this? Has Christendom mis- 
placed the centre of gravity in Christ's teach- 
ing? It would be hard to avoid this conclusion 
if the contention w T ere right that ethical teach- 
ing apart from any doctrine of a future life 
formed the sum and substance of Christ's mes- 
sage. It would be more true to the facts to say 
that His thought and outlook were deter- 
mined by belief in the immortal life, that His 
religion and His ethics alike would be meaning- 
less without this basic truth. "The Sermon on 
the Mount," says Dr. J. H. Hyslop, "is far 
more representative of the primitive Christian 
teaching (that is, Christ's own teaching) than 
the doctrine of immortality." 1 But this con- 
trast is unreal and artificial. For the ethical 
teaching rests on immortality as its essential 
presupposition. It is true that the Christian 
belief in life immortal goes back to the resur- 
rection of Christ and finds there its strength 
and momentum, but the appearances after the 
Crucifixion w r ould not have been credible had it 
not been for His message and the overwhelming 
moral impression which His personality exerted 

1 Life After Death, p. 93. 






102 THE FUTURE LIFE 

on His followers. We fail to recognize this be- 
cause the forms in which were cast Christ's 
ideas as to the future seem to us foreign and 
at times fantastic, though they were the familiar 
religious speech of the age to which He be- 
longed. The burden of His message is a su- 
preme reality which is called "the Kingdom of 
God," or "the Kingdom of Heaven." The 
phrase is borrowed from the apocalyptic visions 
of contemporary piety, which in turn went back 
to the teaching of the prophets, but what con- 
cerns us is its meaning for Jesus. Modern 
social reformers insist the Kingdom of God 
must be set up on earth, and they are right; 
but in so far as they forget that no temporal 
realization of the ideal can satisfy the demand 
of Jesus, they are wrong. To His vision the 
Kingdom was the divine order within which true 
life was to be realized, a life to which death was 
a sheer irrelevance. In the Sermon on the 
Mount — in all probability, a collection of 
thoughts and sayings originally delivered at 
ifferent times — the utterance which stands first 
trikes the keynote of the whole: "Blessed are 
he poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of 
eaven," 1 or, as in the more original form, 
1 Blessed are ye poor, for yours is the King- 
Matthew v, 3. 



■ 



JESUS CHRIST AND FUTURE LIFE 103 ■ 

dom of God. ' ' * The persons to whom He speaks 
were the socially despised, poor peasants and 
fisher folk, shut out from the good things of this 
world. He opens to them the gates of a new 
life of unbounded possibilities. He preaches the 
strange wonderful message that poverty was no 
barrier to the Kingdom, nay rather, it was at 
least a negative preparation for entrance to it. 
The failures in this world can be the successes 
in the world to come. This message was new, 
yet old. Here, as elsewhere, it was not the 
function of Jesus to bring unheralded truths to 
His hearers. Belief in immortality had been 
for two centuries and more a widely accepted 
belief among the Jewish people. Only the 
worldly and sceptical Sadducee rejected it. 
Hence Jesus was not constantly asserting it, but 
He sought to purify it from the crudities of popu- 
lar thinking, to moralize it, and to show men 
how to live so as to prove themselves worthy of 
such high destiny. Still more, He not only 
taught immortality, He practised it. To Him 
the invisible world was more real than physical 
objects around Him. Messages, voices, mysteri- 
ous signs, supernormal "guidings" flashed 
from the unseen into the seen, so thin was the 
veil that divided the temporal from the tran- 

1 Luke vi, 20. 



104 THE FUTUKE LIFE 

scendental order. Death was to Him simply an 
episode in the onward march of life. He was 
not interested as we are in bare survival. His 
eye was fixed on life as a spiritual st$te, as a 
condition of moral activity. He told His con- 
temporaries that unless their goodness was of 
a higher order than that of the professed re- 
ligious classes, they would in no wise enter the 
Kingdom of Heaven, 1 and this Kingdom He 
elsewhere identifies with "eternal life." 2 In 
short, as the preacher of a practical religion He 
was concerned with immortality mainly as a 
motive and safeguard of the spiritual life. 

His argument with the Sadducees, 3 who de- 
nied immortality, was not a logical and reasoned 
plea. Eather was it a deep intuition, a far- 
reaching glance into the nature of God and of 
man. They put to Him a supposed case of a 
woman who had married, in accordance with the 
Mosaic law, seven brothers in succession, and 
the question which seemed to reduce the future 
to an absurdity was — whose wife shall she be 
in the resurrection? The reply of Jesus at once 
rejects the materialistic assumption underlying 
the Sadducean contention, and at the same time 
asserts a real personal continuance beyond the 

1 Matthew v, 20. 

2 Luke xviii, 18, 24. 
• Mark xii, 18-27. 



JESUS CHRIST AND FUTUEE LIFE 105 

grave. Sex-relations, He intimates, are abol- 
ished in the other world, which is the realm of 
discarnate spirits. Men and women are as the 
angels, that is, the order to which they belong 
transcends the present order, and marriage, 
birth, and death pass away with all that is 
merely physical. The divine resources are not 
exhausted in the arrangements of the world 
that now is ; they are able to call into existence 
new arrangements in another and higher realm. 
Thus does He lay down the basis of a spiritual 
theory of immortality. Yet He also takes care 
to assert the persistence of personality in all the 
fulness of its powers. His questioners accepted 
the books traditionally ascribed to Moses, and 
with something of an argumentum ad Jiominem 
He asks them to reflect on the meaning of a 
passage whose authority they did not doubt : "I 
am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, 
and the God of Jacob ' ' ; His own interpretation 
comes like a flash of light: "God is not the 
God of the dead, but of the living." Univer- 
salize these terms in the light of Christ's teach- 
ing as a whole, and He seems to say to the Sad- 
ducees, modern as well as ancient: "The per- 
sonality on which God sets a value cannot be 
extinguished in death. The very fact that God 
has once sustained and guided the soul is itself 



106 THE FUTUBE LIFE 

the guarantee that He will not fail it in death 
and through death." Given a God such as 
Christ conceived Him to be and immortality 
follows as an inevitable inference. God is per- 
sonal and holy love ; man is His child. Can we 
imagine the Eternal Love permitting the being 
loved to lapse into non-existence? Such a 
thought introduces a schism into the Divine 
nature and casts a blot on the Divine purpose. 
If it be said that this reasoning is valid so far 
as good men are concerned — but what of the evil 
and the base? Immortality may indeed be 
predicated of lives that are of spiritual worth 
to God, but surely we are not warranted in 
extending it to the vicious, the criminal, the 
worldly, those who in no sense can be called the 
friends of God. Now it is here that we must 
recall Christ's attitude toward human nature in 
general. He was no sentimentalist. He did not 
put on the same level as of equal worth in the 
eyes of Heaven the self-sacrificing and the 
selfish, the penitent saint and the impenitent 
sinner. His ethical sanity was shown on the one 
hand in the distinction which He drew between 
those who did and those who did not the will 
of His Father, and on the other hand, in the 
emphasis He placed on the potentialities of the 
soul, however degraded and lost to all virtue. 



JESUS CHRIST AND FUTURE LIFE 107 

It was not the soul at any given moment in its 
career which filled His vision, but the glorious 
possibilities that lay hidden from the world and 
even from the soul itself. Death could not mean 
the extinction of the Divine spark, the destruc- 
tion of the sleeping potencies of even the most 
sinful. On the contrary, it might well mean, and 
in a universe governed by the Eternal Good- 
ness it ought to mean, the entrance on a ca- 
reer of reform and self-discipline whereby 
all that was lost might be slowly but surely 
regained. ****aSSEZ 

Some five hundred years before Christ Plato 
formulated his argument for immortality in the 
Phaedo, and as Jowett has pointed out * there 
is an analogy between the logic of that work and 
the argument in the Gospels. Said Plato: "If 
the ideas of men are eternal their souls are 
eternal, and if not the ideas, not the souls." 
Said Christ: "If God exists, then the soul exists 
after death ; and if there is no God, there is no 
existence of the soul after death.' ' It is prob- 
able that Plato believed in personal immortal- 
ity, at all events in the period immediately suc- 
ceeding the death of Socrates. His doctrine of 
transmigration, however, with its exclusion of 
personal memory, by implication is a denial of 

1 The Dialogues of Plato, Vol. I, p. 377. 



108 THE FUTURE LIFE 

personal survival. But most scholars would 
say that he failed to prove it. All he succeeded 
in establishing was the persistence of the uni- 
versal soul, the substance out of which indi- 
vidual souls are made. As his latest editor has 
said: " There is nothing to prove that particu- 
lar souls in their departure from the body are 
not reabsorbed in the universal spirit, merging 
their proper consciousness in that common force 
of nature which is ever manifesting itself anew 
in the power of individual life." * 

The truth is that as one reads the Phaedo 
one is conscious that Plato is greater than his 
arguments. His outlook was limited by the in- 
tellectualism which characterized his time and 
country. What he strove to vindicate was the 
survival of man's rational consciousness, 
whereas the belief of Christ conceived of the 
future life as the sphere of man's moral activity 
and abiding fellowship with God in faith and 
service. The really impressive fact is that He 
who by general confession stands first in the 
order of holiness, preaches the same truth that 
lay so close to the deepest interests of the 
philosopher who stands first in the order of in- 
tellect. No authority indeed, however high, can 
compel belief, yet the insights of the incom- 

1 E. D. Archer-Hind: Phaedo of Plato, 2d Ed., preface, p. 28. 



JESUS CHEIST AND FUTURE LIFE 109 

parably great are surely more likely to be 
true to reality than the vaticinations of lesser 
spirits. 

It is obvious that Christ could not communi- 
cate precise details as to the exact conditions 
of the life beyond, and we may add, He would 
not even if He could. He lived in an age and 
in a land steeped in superstitious ideas of the 
world beyond. It was not His role to vie with 
the dreamers and visionaries who revelled in 
the bizarre and vainglorious pictures of the 
future, and who professed to unveil to the living 
world the secrets of the dead. Moreover, even 
if to His clairvoyant vision there had been re- 
vealed the invisible world of the discarnate, so 
that He knew precisely how they lived and what 
they did, how could He share His knowledge 
with those about Him? Only through sensory 
symbols, the means of our present experience, 
could these things be told, and scepticism would 
have always its plausible arguments wherewith 
to explain away the presumed revelations. It 
is His glory to have lifted the great fact of 
immortality out of dark and superstitious imag- 
inings into the clear light of moral truth, and 
of the ever-living and necessary laws that gov- 
ern the spiritual universe. Hence, while He is 
silent as to matters which could only satisfy 



110 THE FUTURE LIFE 

curiosity, He is not heedless of the imperious 
needs of the soul, or of the hopes that give unity 
and dignity to life. 

But there is another reason for His reserve 
as to the place, mode, and conditions of the here- 
after. With Him the thought of a life after 
death is contained in a thought more august 
still, the closeness of the coming Age, the eter- 
nal Kingdom of God. To His prophetic spirit 
the time was foreshortened. An old world was 
dying, a new one was about to be born. Hence 
He regarded all things in the light of this stu- 
pendous event. The sceptical reasonings of the 
philosopher, the curious questionings of the 
common people, seemed to Him the merest 
trifling in view of the supreme reality that was 
about to burst with the crash of doom on the 
world of appearance, and to usher in a new 
heaven and a new earth wherein alone 
righteousness should dwell. Christ was not a 
theosophist preaching to men an occult science, 
nor was He concerned with the special difficul- 
ties which beset a materialistic age like our own. 
On the contrary, He was the Herald of the end, 
the Preacher of repentance with a view to en- 
trance into a kingdom whose morning was about 
to dawn ; and His whole being was flung into a 
delirium of effort to awaken men to a realization 



JESUS CHRIST AND FUTURE LIFE 111 

of the cosmic event, sublime and glorious be- 
yond their utmost power to imagine. What 
had He to do with the How and the Why, the 
This or the That of the future? He sends out 
His disciples to proclaim in tones of trumpet 
clearness His word of warning. The time is all 
too short, only long enough for repentance. All 
questions of an interesting kind about how the 
dead fare in their hidden world were swallowed 
up in the awe-inspiring expectation that very 
soon the gathered generations, past and present, 
would enter on a new life of transcendent 
blessedness. 

In the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, 1 
the plutocrat who was "clothed in fine linen and 
fared sumptuously every day" and the poor 
man, "laid at his gate, full of sores, and desir- 
ing to be fed with the crumbs which fell from 
the rich man's table,' ' we have an imaginative 
picture of the law of moral continuity. The 
curtain falls upon the life-history of these two 
men, and when it lifts again, we find the rich 
man in torment and the poor man in blessed- 
ness. What is the meaning of the story? Is it 
that wealth here means poverty in the world 
beyond, and poverty here means wealth there? 
So thinks Dr. G. Stanley Hall, who, in his work 

1 Luke xvi, 19-31. 



112 THE FUTURE LIFE 

Jesus Christ in the Light of Psychology, re- 
marks that " there is no intimation that Dives 
had any guilt save that of being rich, or that 
Lazarus had any merit save poverty, unless 
Dives ought to have known and relieved the suf- 
fering of Lazarus ; but the next world is simply 
one of complemental reversal. Wealth here is 
repaid with Hell there and pauperism with 
Heaven. 9 ' * 

One of Martineau's incisive criticisms might 
be appropriately applied to this statement: "It 
contains the maximum of error in the minimum 
of space." A careful reading of the story with 
allowance for Christ's method of leaving some- 
thing to the imagination of His hearers will 
prove that He does not make the incidence of 
penalty or suffering in the other world a 
mechanical affair, a thing dependent on the 
chance of death. He represents the poor man 
as laid at the gates of the rich man, desiring to 
be fed. Is this not a hint that the sin of the 
rich man lay not in his riches, but in his lack 
of sympathy with the beggar staring him in the 
face day by day? But still more important is 
the emphasis on repentance. Why does the rich 
man implore Abraham to send Lazarus to his 
five brothers on earth that they may repent? 

1 Vol. II, p. 586. 



JESUS CHRIST AND FUTURE LIFE 113 

Repent of what? Of being rich or of failing to 
use their riches aright? To ask that question 
is to answer it. The rich man is condemned, 
then, not because he was rich, but because he 
was heartless. He suffers the result of selfish 
living. This is the lesson of the parable, and 
the idea of immortality is simply called in to 
reinforce the moral, not as a truth of indepen- 
dent significance to be taught for its own sake. 
Christ has thus moralized, as none else has ever 
done, the realms of heaven and hell. They are 
not static conditions. There is an upward and 
a downward movement. The law of moral con- 
tinuity holds good there as well as here. 
" Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also 
reap." Yet there is impressed on man's spirit- 
ual constitution a law of renewal whereby the 
very abhorrence for his sin, awakened within 
him by the discipline of pain, marks the first 
stage of his recovery. And may we not see a 
trace of the working of this law in the soul of 
the tormented as he begs for some message 
from the dead to carry an admonition to his 
brethren lest they also should tempt the same 
fate? Nor must we suppose that in Christ's 
thought all punishment in the future life is on 
the same non-moral level. Responsibility goes 
hand in hand with privilege. The servant that 



114 THE FUTURE LIFE 

knew his master's will and did it not shall be 
beaten with many stripes, whereas he that knew 
it not and did things worthy of stripes shall be 
beaten with few stripes. 1 

It is the weakness of the modern pulpit that 
in a natural reaction against the over-emphasis 
of an earlier age on the punishments of the 
other world and against the exaggerations in 
which an unbridled imagination revelled, it 
should fall into the opposite error of obscuring 
the life after death by vague generalities 
wherein the dread effects of selfish living on the 
post-mortem future of the soul tend to vanish 
from all vital conviction. The extreme and un- 
warranted pronouncements of popular evan- 
gelism that outrage alike the spirit of a rational 
religion and the teaching of sound psychology, 
are no valid excuse for the failure of the pulpit 
to proclaim, in harmony with Christ's thought, 
that our desires and deeds have a permanent 
effect on character, that every act leaves its 
marks, for weal or woe, on the soul and that not 
Omnipotence itself can annul the law which 
binds suffering to sin. In our fear of introduc- 
ing selfish motives into the life of virtue, we 
have forgotten that after all we are moral and 
intelligent beings, and that the consequences of 

x Luke xii, 47, 48. 



A 



JESUS CHRIST AND FUTURE LIFE 115 

our acts are in part, at all events, a motive to 
action. 

Doubtless there is noble truth in the story of 
that mysterious woman who was seen once on 
the streets of Damascus, bearing in the one 
hand a pan of fire and in the other a pitcher of 
water. On being asked what she purposed to 
o with them, she answered: " Burn up Para- 
dise and put out the fires of Hell so that men 
may do good for the love of God alone.' 9 Yet 
we need not hesitate to affirm that the vast 
majority of men have not reached as yet that 
peak of perfection, and that therefore we can- 
not dispense with such ethical stimulants to 
self-improvement as may be afforded by the 
contemplation of the indestructible effects on 
our spiritual future of what we think and do 
here and now. 

But perhaps what needs emphasis at the 
present time, when ecclesiastical tradition has 
so dehumanized our Lord's thought that the 
life beyond has lost its savour for even many 
Christians, is that the other world is a world of 
truly human relations and activities. Under 
the symbols which He uses we discern that the 
after-world is a social order. He figures the 
relations in which spirits shall stand to each 
other as those natural to frank and joyous inter- 



116 THE FUTURE LIFE 

course. Very significant is the fact that He 
selects the homely illustration of a common meal 
in order to portray the happiness of the good. 
"They will come from the east and the west, 
from the north and the south, and sit down at 
table in the Kingdom of God. ' ' * Jesus Himself 
looked forward to a joyful rendezvous with the 
great prophetic spirits of the past, whom He 
expected to recognize. He speaks of "Abra- 
ham, Isaac, and Jacob and all the prophets in 
the Kingdom of God, ' ' with whom He hoped to 
hold converse. His unwavering assurance on 
this point as compared with the doubt of 
Socrates whether he would meet after death 
with the wise and great of the past is due to 
that firm hold on the reality of God which the 
philosopher could not attain. 

Clearly Jesus conceives of the world beyond 
the grave as an organized community. He 
speaks of eating, drinking, judging, serving, of 
scenes of joy and happiness in the presence of 
angels — all symbols, no doubt, but symbols 
which point to an organized life. Here we have 
no neo-platonic flight of the alone to the Alone, 
no survival simply of the intellect as philoso- 
phers have imagined, but the continuance and 

1 Luke xiii, 29. Compare the Parable of the Wedding Feast, 
Matthew xxii, 1-14. 



JESUS CHRIST AND FUTURE LIFE 117 

enjoyment of all truly human powers and facul- 
ties. Whatever else the future life may be, at 
least it will not be thinner or poorer than the life 
we now know. 

Within the community there is room for work. 
Unselfish service to God and man will char- 
acterize the good; and the greatest will be the 
most eminent in serving others. "My Father 
worketh up till now, ' ' says Jesus, ' ' and I work. ' ' 
And if God and Christ are eternally working, 
it follows that those who would resemble them 
in spirit will participate in their activities. 
Everlasting unemployment would to the human 
spirit become an intolerable burden; and too 
often the heavenly world has been presented 
as a scene of idleness. Yet the law of contin- 
uity would suggest that we shall in the world 
beyond engage in those pursuits analogous to 
those for which we have taste and aptitude in 
this world. Just as in this life our highest 
happiness lies in the exercise of our moral 
energies, so in the new world, these energies, 
set free from the hampering influences of the 
body and inherited or acquired weakness, shall 
win greater heights of achievement than were 
possible to us here. And when we reflect that, 
as Christ teaches, there are lesser and greater 
in the Kingdom, it is not overstraining the 



118 THE FUTURE LIFE 

thought to say that no small part of the work 
of good men and women in the world to come 
will be in the exercise of their philanthropic and 
redeeming powers. The weak, the ignorant, the 
sinful, the penitent, shall all need help there as 
they need it here. Will it not be the joy of the 
learned, the strong, the spiritually advanced to 
share their good things with the spiritually in- 
ferior? 

And what about our relation to those in this 
spirit-world? Are they beyond the reach of 
our thought and desire? Let us remind our- 
selves that the dead live in God even as they 
lived in Him when they were in the flesh; and 
if we could pray for them and they could pray 
for us on this material plane what power has 
death to destroy our spiritual fellowship with 
them that they are no longer within our physi- 
cal ken? Death in itself, be it repeated, is a 
physical process and works no metamorphosis 
on the human spirit ; not one of our moral and 
spiritual relations is altered. To cease to 
pray for one who has passed through the ex- 
perience of death must mean either that death 
is the end or that the world into which it ushers 
the soul is static in character, admitting of no 
spiritual progress — which latter doctrine robs 
the life hereafter of all interest and value to 



JESUS CHRIST AND FUTURE LIFE 119 

any rational intelligence. Surely it is more in 
harmony with right reason and with the genius 
of the Christian religion to believe that the 
spiritual laws which obtain in the present order 
of existence are valid as far as human experi- 
ence extends. With our prayers we may follow 
our dead into their new life, and we may well 
believe that our desires can help them amid 
their new duties, experiences, and responsibili- 
ties. And may we not add that as long as they 
retain memory and consciousness they will not 
fail to think of us and to breathe a prayer that 
unto us also all may be well? 

Thus does the other world open up be- 
fore us a sphere, truly human yet freed from 
our terrestrial limitations, with endless oppor- 
tunity for the divine enterprises of pity, 
patience, self-sacrifice, for the unimpeded play 
of all our moral energies devoted to the good 
of our fellows. Such a world cannot but ap- 
peal to our noblest instincts and cannot but 
substitute for a languid belief the glowing 
ardour of high desires. With this vision of a 
future lighted with the radiant hues of hope, 
we can gird ourselves for the tasks of the pres- 
ent life in assured confidence that no true work 
accomplished here shall fail of its spiritual 
fruition hereafter. 



CHAPTER VII 

BID JESUS RISE FROM THE DEAD? 

"One thing is certain,' ' says Harnack, "from 
this [Christ's] grave has sprung the inde- 
structible faith in the overthrow of death and 
in an eternal life. . . . Wherever today against 
all the impressions of nature there exists a 
strong faith in the infinite worth of the soul, 
wherever death has lost its terrors, wherever 
the sufferings of this world are measured 
against a future glory, there is bound up with 
these vital feelings the conviction that Jesus 
Christ has forced His way through death ; that 
i God has awakened Him and raised Him to life 
/ and glory." 1 In Christendom, at all events, 
wherever faith in a future life is still a vital con- 
viction, it is to be traced back to the belief that 
Jesus Christ survived bodily death and reap- 
peared to certain of His followers. No one dis- 
putes the fact that had it not been for faith in 
I the Kesurrection the cause of Jesus would have 
\ perished with Him in His grave. Further, no 

1 Das Wesen des Christenthums, p. 102. 

120 



DID JESUS RISE FROM THE DEAD? 121 

one disputes the fact that apart from this faith 
it would be impossible to account for the exist- 
ence of one of the greatest institutions in his- 
tory, the Church, using the term in no narrow 
or sectarian sense. And lastly, no one disputes 
the fact that between the paralysis of faith, the 
utter despair born of the tragedy of the 
Master's end, and the beginnings of the vic- 
torious campaign which His followers conducted 
j against the combined forces of ecclesiasticism, 
imperialism, and popular superstition, some- 
thing happened, and this something they al- 
leged to be the Resurrection. Hence the biog- 
raphy of Jesus does not end with His death ; it 
must include His appearances after death. For 
His influence in history took its rise in and is 
sustained by the conviction that He manifested 
• Himself on the material plane after His cruci- 
l fixion. These facts are beyond all reasonable 
1 doubt, account for them as we may. 

But doubts and difficulties begin to emerge as 
soon as we seek to understand what precisely 
cjL we mean by the Resurrection and what value we 
J^are to attach to the historical testimonies 
brought forward in its behalf. Very often the 
devout Christian confounds his present experi- 
ence of Christ as a spiritual force energizing in 
his life with the historical fact that Christ rose 



122 THE FUTURE LIFE 

from the dead in Palestine about 1900 years ago. 
We can experience the living mystical Christ 
through His influence over our characters. For, 
as the unknown author of Theologia Germanica 
writes: "In so far as a man's life is according 
to Christ, Christ Himself dwelleth in him, and 
if he hath not the one, neither hath he the other. 
For where there is the life of Christ, there is 
Christ Himself. ' ' 1 But this mystical experience 
has nothing to do with facts of history. These 
must be proved by historical witnesses. That 
1 Christ energizes in the moral universe today we 
can experience for ourselves; that on the first 
Easter morning He rose from the dead is an 
historical happening to be established by his- 
torical research and study of all available 
sources of information. Now, when we turn to 
the New Testament within which all the acces- 
sible testimony is to be found, we discern two 
main traditions, one handed down in the 
Gospels, confused, discrepant, and clearly con- 
sisting of divergent reports originating in dif- 
ferent quarters of the Christian community, but 
bearing witness in essence to one sublime cer- 
tainty: "He is risen. It is He Himself and not 
some visual shade that we have seen. The same 
Jesus that we knew and loved when He lived 

1 Chapter xlvi. 



DID JESUS RISE FEOM THE DEAD? 123 

amongst us, manifested Himself to us by in- 
fallible proofs." It would be easy to draw up 
a rather formidable list of discrepancies be- 
tween the narratives of the four Gospels, and 
a vast amount of ingenuity has been spent in 
disentangling the various strands of tradition 
that have been so greatly confused. But hap- 
> pily we are not dependent on these stories which 
! are the source of our most perplexing difficulties 
(jtoday. We have another, a simpler and an 
absolutely authentic account by St. Paul, who 
I wrote his First Epistle to the Corinthians some 
I twenty-five years after the Crucifixion. This 
I testimony is the solid rock on which the waves 
of destructive criticism have dashed in vain. 
The present writer believes that any open and 
candid mind, propossessed with no dogmatic 
assumptions against the survival of the soul 
after death, can convince itself that Christ 
emerged from the realm of the dead, and mani- 
fested Himself on the material plane to certain 
witnesses, by concentrating attention on what 
Paul has to say in the light of modern reflection, 
using the Gospel records as subsidiary and cor- 
roborative. All his authentic letters rest on and 
imply his own direct and immediate experience 
of the actuality of the Eesurrection. The most 
famous and the most cogent passage is, as has 



124 THE FUTURE LIFE 

been indicated, the fifteenth chapter of the First 
Epistle to the Corinthians, verses 3-8, 11. Here 
are his words in Dr. Moffatt's well-known trans- 
lation: " First and foremost, I passed on to you 
what I had myself received, namely, that Christ 
died for our sins as the scriptures had said, that 
he was buried, that he rose on the third day, as 
the scriptures had said, and that he was seen by 
Cephas, then by the twelve; after that, he was 
seen by over five hundred brothers all at once, 
the majority of whom survive to this day, 
though some have died ; after that he was seen 
by James, then by all the apostles, and finally, 
he was seen by myself, by this so-called ' abor- 
tion' of an apostle. . . . Such is what we 
preach, such is what you believed.' ' 

Let us consider this calm and measured state- 
ment with a mind free from all dogmatic pre- 
possessions and anxious only to learn the 
facts. 

To begin with, the Apostle is not proclaiming 
a new idea which he wishes to commend to 
doubting or sceptical minds. On the contrary, 
he is setting forth the common faith of the 
Christian Society, the faith which he had him- 
self received, and which the Christians at 
Corinth had believed through the agency of his 
preaching. His experience was not a private 



DID JESUS RISE FROM THE DEAD? 125 

matter. It was one which he shared with Peter 
and James and the rest. If it be asked what 
opportunity he had for learning what they had 
witnessed, it suffices to point to Paul's own 
statement that he spent a fortnight at Peter's 
house in Jerusalem a few years after the Cruci- 
fixion. 1 

It is to be further noted that the Apostle does 
not describe the Resurrection. "He rose on 
the third day." Rose from where? And how 
did He rise? Paul is silent. All we know is 
that He rose from among the dead, or departed 
spirits, into light and glory. And as this event 
took place in the invisible world, it is obvious 
that no description of its mode or conditions is 
possible. In a later part of the chapter he 
argues for the resurrection of the body, but not 
the body laid in the grave (that is flesh and 
blood which cannot inherit the heavenly world), 
but another and a different body. We infer, q 
then, that Paul would have us know that Jesus 
rose out of the world of spirits in a new and 
spiritual embodiment. 

But what Paul emphasizes is not Christ's act 
of rising from the dead. It is His appearances / 
that he stresses. And the appearances which 
he records are six in number. This does not 

1 Galatians i, 18, 19. 



126 THE FUTURE LIFE 

mean that there were not others, it only means 
that these are cited as known to the Apostle 
and as constituting a solid defence of the central 
truth of the Christian religion. He ' ' appeared f } 
to Peter, to the Twelve, to more than five hun- 
dred members of the Christian community at 
one time, to James, to all the Apostles, and 
finally, to Paul himself. The appearances to 
Peter and to the Twelve are corroborated by the 
tradition preserved in the Gospel of Luke. 1 If 
St. Paul had not been sure of what he was say- 
ing, how could he, while Peter and a majority 
of the more than five hundred referred to were 
alive, proclaim the fact of the appearances as 
witnessed by them? 

When we consider the psychological situation 
created by Christ's tragic end, implying as it 
did the refutation of His claim to be the ap- 
pointed Messenger of Heaven, and the utter 
shipwreck of His followers' hopes, to be suc- 
ceeded shortly afterwards by a recreated faith 
in His divine mission, and by a boundless 
courage and an unconquerable moral energy, 
the principle of causality demands that a suf- 
ficient reason be forthcoming for such a mo- 
mentous transformation. Now Paul supplies 
the necessary cause. It was the certain and per- 

1 Chapter xxiv, 34, 36. 



DID JESUS RISE FROM THE DEAD? 127 

manent conviction of these witnesses that they 
had been in contact with Jesus Himself in all 
the fulness of His personal life, and for this 
conviction they were prepared, if need be, to 
lay down their lives. It was their unshaken 
assurance that their risen Master had mani- 
fested Himself to one or more of their physical / 
. senses. Modern sceptical writers do not ques- 
tion that the disciples believed they saw Jesus 
after His death, but they hold that the belief 
was a mistaken interpretation of a purely self- 
created and subjective phenomenon. What the 
disciples really saw was not Jesus nor any other 
objective reality whatever, but a reaction of 
their own minds under the rebound from de- 
spair, a reaction which took the form of, or, as it 
were, projected itself as a visual impression. 
What they experienced was the creation of a 
powerful autosuggestion and is to be explained 
by purely psychical processes. It is very sig- 
nificant that in the most recent attempt to con- 
trovert the reality of Christ's Resurrection, 
the writer refuses to face the Pauline 
witness. He confines himself to the easy task 
of refuting the notion of a physical resur- 
rection. 1 

Now both belief and scepticism are agreed on 

1 A. W. Martin : Faith in the Future Life. 



128 THE FUTURE LIFE 

one point : these witnesses had visions of Jesus 
after His death. But while the sceptic holds 
that the visions were like the dagger which the 
heat-oppressed brain of Macbeth conjured up, 
"a false creation," the witnesses themselves 
were convinced that what they saw was "veri- 
dical," that is, truth-telling, and was produced 
by the actual presence of the real and veritable 
Jesus whom they had seen and heard in the 
days of His flesh. Surely the burden of proof 
lies with the sceptic. What evidence does he 
bring forward to refute the claim of those who 
assert that they beheld the form of One who had 
died? None. All he can do is to fall back upon 
the assumption: "dead men do not rise." 
Bather than believe in the possibility of such 
an event, it is preferable, he would hold, to 
strain psychological possibilities to the break- 
ing-point or to throw up the whole problem as 
insoluble. But how do we know that dead men 
do not rise? We do not know it and the asser- 
tion is a mere assumption, and an assumption 
which is being called in question more and more 
as time passes. If our view of the universe 
makes this world a self-contained whole, com- 
pletely shut off from the world of the discar- 
nate so that we cannot even say with Fechner, 
"sometimes a little chink does open, suddenly 



DID JESUS EISE FROM THE DEAD? 129 

and quickly closes again, in the gate generally 
shut up between this world and the next," then 
the matter is Predetermined, and discussion is 
superfluous. On the other hand, if we have 
found reasons to believe that the veil which 
hides the other w r orld from us has grown so 
thin that to some finer sense than those which 
make us aw r are of physical things has been 
revealed a glimpse of a transcendental realm 
close to us and crowded with other intelligences, 
we can accept the simple and natural view of 
Christ's friends that He was actually present 
and convinced them of His reality. It is a 
striking fact that some men of distinction, like 
the late Mr. F. W. H. Myers, who had lost faith 
in the Eesurrection, because of its incompati- 
bility with their view of the natural order, have 
recovered their faith because of experiences 
which compelled them to change their concep- 
tion of this order. In his w r ork, Survival of 
Human Personality After Bodily Death, this 
writer speaking of these experiences says that 
u asa matter of fact our research has led us to 
results that have not been negative only but 
largely positive. We have shown that amid 
[ much deception and self-deception, fraud and 
illusion veritable manifestations do reach us 
from beyond the grave. The central claim of 



130 THE FUTURE LIFE 

Christianity is thus confirmed as never be- 
fore/' 1 

Granted, it may be said, that Jesus Christ in 
the first century of our era stepped forth from 
the invisible into the phenomenal world, what 
bearing has that fact today on faith in the life 
after death? Now we are in a different situa- 
tion from that in which the first Christians 
found themselves. They were visited by a 
wonderful and soul-transforming experience, a 
vision of the Son of Man risen from the dead ; 
we in this far distant age, with minds prepos- 
sessed with a philosophical or scientific world- 
view, must grope our way back to the great 
event amid manifold historical, critical, and 
psychological difficulties. The men of the first 
century argued: immortality is a fact, a glori- 
ous and palpable reality, filling earth and sky 
with its splendour, for we have beheld with our 
eyes the face and form of Him who had been 
crucified and who had died and had been buried. 
We argue : believing as we do in the Fatherhood 
of God, in the ethical value of personality, in the 
ultimate righteousness of the world-order, we 
are constrained to believe in immortality, and 
in virtue of this belief we are unable to with- 
hold our acceptance of the Pauline testimony 

1 Vol. II, p. 288 (italics are mine). 



DID JESUS RISE FROM THE DEAD? 131 

that by means of a truth-telling, objectively 
valid vision, Jesus Christ manifested Himself 
on this earth to hundreds of witnesses. Thus 
by our different relations in time to the histori- 
cal fact, our spiritual relations cannot but be 
/affected, so that while the early Christian in- 
I f erred immortality from the Resurrection, we, 
T>n the contrary, can believe in the Resurrection 
because we already believe in immortality. 
While this is true, is it not also true that his- 
torically belief in Christ's victory over death 
has had a powerful influence in putting at the 
very heart of the Christian message the mighty 
hope of an endless life? For many centuries, 
the belief in some kind of existence beyond the 
grave was practically universal. Homer, Plato, 
Virgil, the Old Testament prophets and his- 
torians testify to the popular belief in a world 
I of shades, pale phantoms, flitting about in 
> Stygian gloom and sadness. Such a life — if life 
it could be called — was no object of desire to 
any rational being. It was man's fate, the doom 
decreed for him by the inscrutable will of 
Heaven. He looked forward to it with fear and 
repulsion. It was literally true to say that all 
his lifetime he was subject to bondage through 
fear of death. But suddenly the dread gave way 
to desire. Wherever the Christian message was 



132 THE FUTURE LIFE 

accepted, the entire psychological climate of 
the soul was reversed, and the life beyond be- 
came an object of love and longing and aspira- 
tion. This is the indubitable fact of history. 
And the explanation is at hand. The person- 
ality and career of Jesus Christ had brought 
home to the human heart the love of God as a 
reality which created a new heaven and a new 
earth, which energized as a mighty power of 
redemption in the lives of men. The tragedy of 
the Crucifixion seemed to eclipse this wondrous 
sun that had for a space illumined their uni- 
verse. But with the reappearance of their de- 
parted Master, the love which had shone forth 
in His earthly life now rises in new majesty, 
reveals its invincible greatness and indestruc- 
tible force in that death had to give way before 
it. Wherever Christ is, love is. Whatever 
world He inhabits, it is filled with the sunshine 
of goodness, self-sacrifice, and glory unspeak- 
able. Hence there came into the conception of 
the life to come a definiteness, a certainty, and 
a desirableness which had been hitherto un- 
known. And even yet simple and devout souls 
throughout Christendom rest on this tradition 
in childlike faith, and have an assurance and 
inward freedom which more critical natures 
often envy. To the average man there is a 



DID JESUS RISE FROM THE DEAD? 133 

weakness in all our arguments. Elaborate 
reasonings, conclusions extracted painfully 
from premises which are open to debate, ap- 
pear bloodless and remote from reality. Over 
against them stands the dark and chilling fact 
of the apparently unbroken silence of the ages. 
"Thousands of generations," says Carlyle, "all 
as noisy as our own, have been swallowed up of 
time, and there remains no wreck of them any 
more, and Pleiades and Arcturus and Orion and 
Sirius are still shining in their courses as when 
the shepherd first noted them on the plains of 
Shinar." 

It cannot be denied that one authentic in- 
stance of a traveller returned from the land 
of spirits would outweigh a thousand specula- 
tive arguments which seem weak as gossamer 
threads to the soul face to face with death and 
the dark unknown. The believer in the Chris- 
tian story holds that in one signal case the ever- 
lasting silence has been broken, and his faith in 
immortality wins thereby an intensity and a 
clearness which otherwise would be impossible. 
But what about non-Christians, devout Jews, 
Buddhists? This argument cannot find them. 
What it gains in intension, it loses in ex- 
tension. Indeed the argument from Resurrec- 
tion to immortality as developed by Paul is 



N 



134 THE FUTURE LIFE 

concerned only with those who have identified 
themselves in thought and life with Jesus 
Christ. It does not touch the case of men in 
general. His reasoning is not: " Jesus rose 
from the dead and reappeared on earth, there- 
fore all men are immortal,' 7 but it is this: 
" Jesus, as the Head of a new humanity mys- 
tically united to Him by faith and a common 
spiritual life, rose again, and therein is the 
pledge and guarantee that His members shall 
also rise again." But this mystical doctrine is 
too high even for the great majority of Chris- 
tians and to those who have been bred on a 
different tradition and within a different fellow- 
ship, it is quite unintelligible. But immortality 
belongs to man as man, though its spiritual 
quality, its blessedness or the reverse, will be 
determined by the presence or absence of 
Christlike virtues and graces, themselves the 
proof that God has not left Himself without a 
witness in any human spirit. 

What, then, is the real significance of Christ's 
Resurrection for belief in an immortal life? 
What is its message to men in general? It 
offers not only proof of survival but more par- 
ticularly it makes survival worth while, an end 
to be desired. All the higher religions imply a 
doctrine of immortality, a belief that the soul 



DID JESUS RISE FROM THE DEAD? 135 

lives on after the physical organism has per- 
ished, or as in the Judaism of Christ's day, that 
it lives in the old body, with all its defects and 
weaknesses, reanimated and supernaturally re- 
• stored from the dust of the grave. But what the 
/ Resurrection of Christ offers to him who can 
] accept it is the possibility that every righteous 
man, every one who cleaves to what he per- 
ceives to be best, will not only live on in the 
other world but will win a new embodiment, a 
fit medium for nobler and more unimpeded ac- 
tivities, and for the enjoyment of those per- 
sonal relationships which constitute a truly 
human life. It is a revelation not merely of 
the fact of survival but of its nature as no 
ghostly or abstract continuance after death, as 
rather a truly concrete, rich, and manifold 
human life. Apart from this revelation we may 
conceive of the future life in the manner of the 
ultra-idealist as an abstract stream of con- 
sciousness functioning in the absolute or as an 
idea persisting in the Divine mind or as a series 
of mental images connected with an atom which 
? cannot be destroyed. But ordinary healthy 
I human nature has no interest in such a future. 
; These bloodless categories may, perhaps, seem 
a very Paradise to the philosopher; it is to be 
feared that to the great mass of non-philosophi- 



136 THE FUTURE LIFE 

cal humanity, they would offer an exceedingly 
uninteresting prospect, so much so, indeed, that 

j men generally would be inclined to say : Eather 
no future at all, rather blank non-existence than 
a future such as these theories imply. It is in- 
deed a curious situation in which modern 
thought in regard to the problem of the after- 
life finds itself. As in ancient times popular 
beliefs robbed the future world of all interest 
and value, so is it today with much of our most 

I respected philosophy. It, too, makes the future 
after death abstract, dreary, and far from ap- 
petizing. The world beyond the grave was 
peopled according to ancient imagination with 
vague, weak, ineffectual shades ; the same world, 
according to some of our most venerated pro- 
fessors of philosophy, is the theatre of an "un- 
earthly ballet" of the thinnest abstractions ever 
spun by human brains. In both cases, the future 
life, ceasing to interest, ceases to stir hope or 

I provide stimulus or affect life at any point. 
The Christian message where accepted restores 

1 the interest, for it interprets the life to come as 
not less but more than the present life, as a 
state of being analogous to our present exist- 
ence but richer, fuller, intenser, involving a 
very plenitude of emotional and intellectual 
activity, and of an ever-ascending range of 



DID JESUS RISE FROM THE DEAD? 137 

social relationships. Christ came back from the 
/ undiscovered country to this living world as a 
/ friend would visit friends, to reassure them, to 
say that all was well, nay more, that their hopes 
were far below the sublime reality. Henceforth 
that other world meant for them far more than 
it had ever done before. They carried over into 
it all the wonder and the glory, all the beauty 
and the gladness, all the satisfaction to heart 
and mind which His ministry among them had 
wrought. Is it any wonder that they found the 
true home of the soul where lived their heart's 
love and admiration? The world of the dead no 
longer struck a chill to their souls when they 
thought of it. On the contrary, it flung upon 
them a great fascination, and inspired them 
with an ardent longing. It may be that here 
is the open door through which Christianity may 
enter and repeat its ancient triumphs. Make 
the future life the realization of a man's ideal 
\ strivings, the embodiment of all his highest 
| aspirations, and it will become an object of 
desire, something for which he will surrender 
all lesser lures. And among these aspirations 
can there be any more worthy of the soul than 
the desire for intimate communion with these 
higher and more spiritual intelligences that 
have blessed the world with their presence and 



138 THE FUTURE LIFE 

work in it? Such is the thought of one of the 
greatest minds of the nineteenth century. "We 
shall," says Fechner, "enter into close fellow- 
ship with the great spirits of those who lived, 
in their second stage of life, long before us, but 
whose great example and wisdom served to 
form our own minds. Thus he who lived here 
entirely in Christ will be entirely in Christ here- 
after; nor is his individuality to be extinguished 
within a higher individuality; nay, he will be 
established, and receive new T strength, and at 
the same time be able to strengthen others." 1 
To sum up: the signal contribution which 
Jesus Christ has made to the teaching about 
immortality was wrought, partly, by the revela- 
tion during His earthly career of what consti- 
tuted the immortal life in the highest sense of 
the term, the sharing in qualities which are by 
their nature deathless, faith, hope, love, peace, 
, and their allied graces; and partly, by His 
triumph over death and self-manifestation in 
glorified form to the eyes and hearts of those 
who had loved Him and had mourned His tragic 
end. His return from the realms of the dead 
was not necessary to persuade them of survival; 
j like all pious people of the time, they believed 
I in a post-mortem existence. But it was neces- 

1 On Life After Death, p. 67. 



DID JESUS EISE FROM THE DEAD? 139 

sary to dissipate the vagueness and uncertainty 
of their ideas, to reassure them, to make clear 
that the life to come is a higher stage in the 
development of the human spirit for all who 
here aspire and strive. Because of this revela- 
tion it seemed to them that Christ was the 
\ bringer of real immortality, and strong in this 
J mighty hope they despised death, even though it 
/ came to them in forms the very thought of which 
I makes the blood run cold in our veins today, and 
\ they revolutionized the civilization of the em- 
' pire and set in motion forces which have exer- 
cised incalculable influence on the moral life of 
humanity. Throughout all the Christian cen- 
turies myriads of men and women have found in 
/death no longer an enemy but a friend, the 
opener of the gate through which the soul 
passes to the fulfilment of its dearest hopes, 
the fruition of its strivings and strugglings 
here below. 



CHAPTER Vni 

THE ARGUMENT FROM PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 

A little while ago it was possible to write 
about immortality without deeming it neces- 
sary to acknowledge, except, perhaps, by a 
perfunctory allusion, the existence of the 
Psychical Eesearch movement inaugurated for 
the investigation of certain obscure and ab- 
normal phenomena which have been generally 
relegated to the sphere of superstition and 
hysteria. But, as some of the finest and most 
acute minds of this generation have concluded 
that when a critical sifting has done its work, 
there is left a solid block of evidence not 
capable of any "naturalistic" explanation, we 
can no longer ignore the facts or smile away 
the interpretation which competent students 
have put upon them. Yet if it were possible 
one might be well content to pass the subject 
by, for among all the bewildering and perplex- 
ing problems that have ever taxed human wits, 
unquestionably this problem takes a pre- 
eminent place. Indeed, it seems presumptuous 

140 



THE ARGUMENT FROM RESEARCH 141 

for any one who has not spent many years on 
personal investigation to offer any judgment 
as to its meaning and worth. Psychical re- 
search may be, as many think, absurd, but the 
way in which its arguments are often answered 
is still more absurd. Sneers, ridicule, a priori 
dogmatism, such mouth-filling phrases as "a 
recrudescence of mediaeval superstitution," 
"a scandal and a disgrace" to the fair name 
of science — such things are the fruit of igno- 
rance and prejudice. Could anything be more 
preposterous than the dictum of the late Pro- 
fessor Munsterberg that the evidential facts 
alleged by psychical research not only do not 
exist but can never exist ? And what are we to 
say of the curt dismissal of the whole question 
by Professor A. E. Taylor, member of the 
British Academy, as one of fraud or thought- 
transference, or if these theories break down, 
of possible demoniacal possession." 1 Pro- 
fessor Taylor does not stay to ask what he 
means by thought-transference, whether and to 
what extent such a theory has been proved, how 
the proving of fraud in one psychic can dis- 
prove honesty and high character in another, 
nor finally does he reflect whether the activity 
of evil spirits may not make credible the 

1 See The Faith and the War, p. 136. 



142 THE FUTURE LIFE 

counter-activity of good spirits. The truth is 
the philosopher and the man of science enter- 
tain a certain general view of the world with 
which these alleged facts are incompatible; 
therefore, there is a tendency to argue that the 
facts themselves are unworthy of notice and 
ought to be set aside without more ado. 

Mr. Edward Clodd, in his book If a Man Die 
Shall He Live Again?, gives a list of mediums 
detected in fraud and infers that all the 
phenomena of spiritualism are the work of 
trickery and deception. He fails to notice, how- 
ever, that while some mediums have been proved 
guilty of deliberate and wilful deception, others 
in the light of fuller knowledge can be charged 
only with unconscious simulation of fraudulent 
behaviour. But what is more important, Mr. 
Clodd, with all his claims to scientific method, 
omits to supply a list of "sensitives" whose 
honesty has been placed beyond all dispute 
by critical guardianship extended over many 
years. The fact appears to be that this 
writer approaches the subject with a mind 
already prejudiced against the spiritistic doc- 
trine. 

So, too, with the theologian. As a rule he 
approaches the question with certain theories 
as to the future life in the back of his mind 



THE ARGUMENT FROM RESEARCH 143 

and as the methods and results of psychical 
research appear to conflict with these precon- 
ceived ideas he holds himself excused from 
even examining what may be said in their 
favour. This, of course, is not true of all the 
representatives of religion. The greatest liv- 
ing philosophical divine in the Church of Eng- 
land protests against rejecting the support 
which may be given alike to the Resurrection 
of Christ and to the resurrection of all men by 
"sifted and well-attested evidence of more or 
less analogous appearances of the dead or the 
dying to their friends." 1 The great majority 
of scientists and theologians have built up out 
of their favourite conceptions distinct systems 
of thought by which they picture to themselves 
the universe. The question, of course, is : Are 
these systems final or must they not be so modi- 
fied as to include the new phenomena, if these 
phenomena can be proved to be genuine? The 
modern spirit has small patience with dog- 
matism and finalities of any kind. Its watch- 
word rather is, nothing is impossible, except 
the self-contradictory. The advocates of re- 
ligious faith should take warning from his- 
tory. There are two questions about which 
man's curiosity can not be stilled. These are: 

1 Hastings Rashdall, Doctrine and Development, p. 180. 



144 THE FUTURE LIFE 

Whence has he come? and Whither is he going? 
When Darwin published his Origin of Species 
in 1859, the theological world was shaken to 
its foundations. No lover of truth can look 
back on that controversy without a sense of' 
shame and humiliation. Today all men find in 
Evolution a master-key of knowledge, and be- 
cause of it we understand religion itself better 
than we have ever understood it before. It is 
a painful reflection that the very arguments 
launched against the teaching of Darwin a gen- 
eration ago are being refurbished to do duty 
against the teaching of Sir Oliver Lodge and 
Professor Barrett. Only the other day there 
was published the report of an address by a 
popular preacher, in which he lifted a warning 
voice against the work of the Psychical Re- 
search Society on the ground that it is under- 
mining the foundations of the Christian re- 
ligion and making the Creeds of none effect. 
He does not stay to ask — What is the Christian 
religion? Nor does he inquire whether the tra- 
ditional interpretation of the Creeds is a per- 
manently adequate and final presentation of 
spiritual truth. It is the old appeal to author- 
. ity against the claims of a Divine and progress- 
ive revolution. There is a saying of Samuel 
Taylor Coleridge which that great writer com- 



THE ARGUMENT FROM RESEARCH 145 

mends as worthy to be framed and hung up in 
the library of every student of religion: "He 
who begins by loving Christianity better than 
Truth will proceed by loving his own Sect or 
Church better than Christianity, and end in 
loving himself better than all. ' ' * Unhappily, 
the scientific movement has in the popular mind 
been confused with the unscientific cult of 
spiritualism. This is one of the main reasons 
why, as compared with Great Britain, America 
lags so far behind in the investigation of these 
abnormal incidents. The average spiritualist 
is an exceedingly credulous person, too much 
governed by the emotional interests in the life 
beyond and prone to construct out of doubtful 
material a very portentous edifice. The cre- 
dulity, the intellectual incoherence and lack of 
proportion, and the deception and self-decep- 
tion with which the history of spiritualism has 
been disgraced have created a general preju- 
dice against the whole subject. It is most un- 
fortunate that the term "spiritualism" should 
not have been confined to the cult that bears 
that name and that the term "spiritism" should 
not have been reserved for the scientific move- 
ment. One of the favourite devices of the 
critic is to lump together "spiritualism" as a 

1 Aids to Reflection, Aphorism LXIII. 



146 THE FUTURE LIFE 

religion and "spiritism" as a scientific theory- 
advanced in explanation of certain psychic 
phenomena. Psychical researchers are all 
branded as "gullible" and "credulous," they 
insist, and the fruit of their toil is declared to 
be "nauseating dribble" and "banal inanity." 
Of course, the answer is at hand. Among the 
men of whom these things are said are A. J. 
Balfour, Sir W. F. Barrett, William James, 
and Henri Bergson. 

One of the most impressive facts in the his- 
tory of psychic research is this power to con- 
vert hard-headed and sceptical and even mate- 
rialistically-minded men to views w T hich the 
popular mind denounces as "soft," "supersti- 
tious," "absurd." The most recent example 
of this transforming power is seen in the well- 
known novelist, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who, 
in his book, The New Revelation, tells his 
experiences : 

"When I had finished my medical education 
in 1882, I found myself, like many young 
medical men, a convinced materialist as re- 
gards our personal destiny. I had never ceased 
to be an earnest theist, because it seemed to 
me that Napoleon's question to the atheistic 
professors on the starry night as he voyaged 
to Egypt: 'Who was it, gentlemen, who made 



THE ARGUMENT FROM RESEARCH 147 

these stars?' has never been answered. To say 
that the Universe was made by immutable laws 
only put the question one degree further back 
as to who made the laws. I did not, of course, 
believe in an anthropomorphic God, but I be- 
lieved then, as I believe now, in an intelligent 
Force behind all the operations of Nature — a 
force so infinitely complex and great that my 
finite brain could get no further than its 
existence. Right and wrong I saw also as 
great obvious facts which needed no divine 
revelation. But when it came to a question of 
our little personalities surviving death, it 
seemed to me that the whole analogy of Nature 
was against it. When the candle burns out the 
light disappears. When the electric cell is 
shattered the current stops. When the body 
dissolves there is an end of the matter. Each 
man in his egotism may feel that he ought to 
survive, but let him look, we will say, at the 
average loafer — of high or low degree — would 
any one contend that there was any obvious 
reason why that personality should carry on? 
It seemed to be a delusion, and I was con- 
vinced that death did indeed end all, though I 
saw no reason why that should affect our duty 
towards humanity during our transitory 
existence. 



148 THE FUTURE LIFE 

"This was my frame of mind when Spiritual 
phenomena first came before my notice. ' ' * 

Or take the experience of the late F. W. H. 
Myers. He began life as an earnest believer 
in traditional Christianity, only, however, to 
find that later reflection dissolved away the 
structure of his faith. The point at which he 
especially felt the weakness of his position, was 
the question of immortality. He became an 
agnostic as to a life after death, but deter- 
mined, however, to leave no stone unturned 
in his quest for assurance. He turned to 
psychical research. Years of self-sacrifice 
and laborious effort were at last rewarded: 
"It is only after thirty years of such study 
as I have been able to give that I say to myself 
at last, Habes totd quod mente petisti — 'Thou 
hast what thy whole heart desired'; — that I 
recognize that for me this fresh evidence, — 
while raising that great historic incident of the 
Eesurrection into new credibility, — has also 
filled me with a sense of insight and of thank- 
fulness such as even my first ardent Chris- 
tianity did not bestow." 2 

Dr. James H. Hyslop, the devoted secretary 
of the American Society for Psychical Ee- 

1 The New Revelation, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, pp. 14-16. 

2 Proceedings of the English S.P.R., part XXXVII, p. 114. 



THE ARGUMENT FROM RESEARCH 149 

search, has placed on record the story of his 
failure to find satisfaction in the traditional 
faith of his home and his resolute search for an 
abiding foundation on which to build his life : 

"But scarcely had those feelings shaped 
themselves into resolution when the chilling 
breath of scepticism came to cool the ardour 
of my hopes. The first step in this direction 
was the discovered need for me of revised 
biblical interpretation enforced by a little sec- 
tarian controversy about amending the Con- 
stitution of the United States in favour of 
certain religious acknowledgments. The fatal 
chapter, however, fixing doubt beyond recovery 
was that on the Incarnation and the Resurrec- 
tion in Barnes's Evidences of Christianity. 
Faith might have had its way had it not sub- 
mitted its claims to proof. The very gibes of 
religious fanatics and cartoonists against the 
doctrine of Darwin strengthened it in my sight, 
and every discovery of geology, of physiology, 
and of psychology pointed to only one conclu- 
sion, that of materialism. I accepted it, not 
because it was a desirable philosophy, but be- 
cause the evidence of fact was on its side, and 
neither the illusions of idealism nor the inter- 
ests of religious hope were sufficient to tempt 
me into a career of hypocrisy and cowardice. I 



150 THE FUTURE LIFE 

had to temporize with many a situation until I 
could assure my own mind where it stood. In 
the pursuit of some final truth on which to base 
a life work I passed through all the labyrinths 
of philosophy, losing nothing and gaining noth- 
ing in its meshes. After Plato and Aristotle 
it seemed to lose its moorings in facts and lived 
on tradition and authority. New discoveries 
and reconstruction it despised as it would the 
occupation of neophytes and children. At last 
I was directed to the idealism of Kant for light 
and found there a system as helpless as it was 
mystifying, though it had been born in the 
atmosphere of Swedenborg's distinction be- 
tween the transcendental and the phenomenal 
and of which it soon became ashamed. In it 
the bankruptcy of philosophy was the oppor- 
tunity of science, and in a favourable, though 
accidental moment my attention was attracted 
by psychic research in which the first prospect 
of crucial facts presented itself. 

"However satisfactory philosophy had been 
in showing that the meaning of the cosmos was 
to be found in the supersensible, whether by 
idealism or atomic materialism, the more exact- 
ing method of science, which had strengthened 
the claims of physical law and causes and 
which became the standard of truth, made it 



THE ARGUMENT FROM RESEARCH 151 

necessary to regard the residual phenomena 
of human experience, if only to corroborate the 
inferences which idealism had drawn from the 
normal. In fact, whatever the validity of 
the older views as possible constructions of 
the world, their probability was lost in the face 
of the certitudes of science which had multi- 
plied evidence for the extension of physical 
explanations, and religion had to turn to the 
residual phenomena of life, as it had once done, 
to vindicate its aspirations and interpretation 
of the cosmos. It does not yet clearly see the 
direction from which its light is to come. But 
in the accumulation of facts within the field of 
supernormal phenomena I found the dawn of 
another day for an idealism that will last as 
long as scientific method can claim respect." 1 
The problem of immortality as formulated 
by psychical research ought to be carefully 
noted. Failure to keep this formulation in 
view has led both the average man and the 
critical student into much misdirected antago- 
nism. The psychical researcher takes up the 
question as it has been shaped by modern ma- 
terialism, which simply asserts that normally 
we know consciousness only in connection with 

1 Psychical Research and the Resurrection, by James H. 
Hyslop, pp. 406-408. 



152 THE FUTURE LIFE 

a physical organism, and we cease to find any 
trace of consciousness as soon as the organism 
perishes. As death marks the cessation of all 
other functions of the body, why should con- 
sciousness be an exception? We do not, indeed, 
know what consciousness is, but neither do we 
know what matter is; and materialism main- 
tains that science is concerned primarily not 
with the ultimate constitution of either but 
with the relation in wiiich the one stands to the 
other. Wherever we have mind we have a 
physical organism; with the dissolution of the 
organism, mind ceases to manifest itself, and 
the natural inference is that it ceases to exist. 
To the convinced materialist, therefore, a fu- 
ture life is an absurdity. 

Now it is at this stage that the psychical 
researcher comes upon the scene. He says to 
the materialist: "I accept your argument and I 
propose to give you such evidence as will con- 
vince all rational persons that individual con- 
sciousness does persist after death. This I 
shall do by opening up a channel of communi- 
cation whereby we may get into touch with a 
particular consciousness w r hich may prove its 
identity by recalling its earthly memories, and 
may satisfy us that we are not listening to the 
echoes of our own thoughts but to the veritable 



THE ARGUMENT FROM RESEARCH 153 

experiences of a personality which was once 
alive on earth and now survives in another 
state of being." This is what psychical re- 
search claims to do. Whether it has justified 
its claim is open to dispute; but, at all events, 
we must not blame it for failing to do what it 
has never pretended to do. It does not profess 
to make clear the nature of the other world, 
nor its mode of existence. It throws no light 
on the occupations of surviving personalities, 
nor does it offer to solve a multitude of ques- 
tions which religion and philosophy propound. 
In brief, it sets aside all speculation for the 
time, and concentrates on the task of obtaining 
from deceased persons such information as will 
identify them with personalities known to have 
lived amongst us. This information must be 
of such a character as not to be explicable by 
any normal channel of communication and it 
must consist of such incidents or facts as are 
verifiable and thus capable of proving the 
identity of discarnate intelligences, if such 
there be. 

It is here that so much disappointment is 
experienced. We plough our way through a 
disheartening mass of trivial and incoherent 
details which seem to argue that persons of 
known ability and acumen while on earth have 



■ 

{ 



154 THE FUTURE LIFE 

undergone a sad deterioration since they 
crossed the boundaries of the other world. If 
indeed these individuals who claim to speak to 
us from the other world are what they profess 
to be, why do they convey to us no authentic 
tidings of their new environment, why do they 
not throw light on the vital problems of our 
present existence, on such a question, for 
example, as the real relation of mind and body? 
If the life in the other world is to be judged 
from the Proceedings of the Society, it must 
be pronounced flat, stale, and unprofitable. So 
it would seem, and yet on further thought we 
may have to set aside these questionings as 
irrelevant. Why should we suppose that the 
transition to the realm beyond death marks an 
access of insight into the problems of our 
earthly life? Further, if the experts of the 
Society are looking not for revelations of 
supernal truth but for trivial details of earthly 
experience so as to establish the identity of the 
presumed communicator, the very insignifi- 
cance of the messages may turn out to be a 
point in their favour. And as to information 
about the nature of the other life, we may 
doubt whether it could be given us on this 
material plane, except in a misleading form; 
and if it were given, how is it to be verified? 



THE ARGUMENT FROM RESEARCH 155 

For example, ' ' George Pelham, ' ' the most con- 
vincing of all the communicators, told Dr. 
Richard Hodgson, through Mrs. Piper, that 
the organism with which the departing spirit 
is supplied is made of luminiferous ether — an 
intensely interesting and valuable bit of infor- 
mation, if true! But how do we know that it 
is true? Had Mrs. Piper never heard of the 
Epicurean notion of an "ethereal" body? Is 
it not an easy supposition that her subcon- 
sciousness reproduced this doctrine, accrediting 
it to George Pelham? In any case, we have no 
means of proving or disproving the statement. 
And the same remark may be applied to the 
inspirational utterances with which spiritual- 
istic literature abounds. In so far as they are 
in harmony with received ideas, they may be 
taken as a reflection of the psychic's own 
thought, in so far as they are not verifiable, 
they are useless as evidence, though, for aught 
we can tell, they may be true. What is wanted 
is not revelations of the future state for which 
we have no test of reality, but memories of 
earthly experiences open to inquiry and verifi- 
cation. There is one very important fact about 
the other world — if it be a fact — concerning 
which there is practical unanimity among the 
best accredited psychics. Souls leave this 



156 THE FUTURE LIFE 

world in all stages of moral and intellectual 
growth. In the world beyond, there is, we are 
told, a vast amount of missionary activity 
going on, the more developed helping and 
encouraging those of lesser attainments, and 
all spirits finding scope and room for the ever- 
lasting play of self-sacrifice. Now it is a 
curious fact that about fifty years ago a dis- 
tinguished Scottish divine, Dr. Robert Service, 
published an essay on A Spiritual Theory of 
Another Life, 1 in which on purely Biblical 
and philosophical grounds he defended this 
selfsame thesis. Dr. Service would have re- 
jected with scorn any testimony from the Mrs. 
Pipers of his day, if such had been known to 
him, yet his contention is a commonplace of 
psychical research. Even so, we must ask: 
How do we know that it is true? In asserting 
it to be true, we are really begging the ques- 
tion, for we are assuming that the fact of sur- 
vival has been proved, and that we have some 
test by which we can verify presumed descrip- 
tions of the spiritual activities of surviving 
personalities. 

When we seek to judge the value of the evi- 
dence for communication with the dead, we 
are confronted with certain drawbacks under 

1 Contemporary Review, April, 1871. 



THE ARGUMENT FROM RESEARCH 157 

which it labours. For one thing, it is generally- 
agreed that the most convincing items are too 
intimate to print. To quote a remark of Mr. 
Henry Holt, the well-known New York pub-., 
lisher, in a private letter to the writer, "Nature 
seems to have strengthened the partition be- 
tween this plane and the next by making the 
strongest evidences that death is only a parti- 
tion, so intimate that those experiencing them 
cannot tell of them." Again the material that 
is published loses much of its conviction- 
creating power from the fact that the reader 
has it at second-hand. There is an elusive 
quality about first-hand, direct experiment 
wilich cannot be communicated by any amount 
of reading and reflection. Says Dr. Hodgson 
in reference to his experience with George Pel- 
ham, "the continual manifestation of this per- 
sonality, with its own reservoir of memories, 
with its swift appreciation of any reference to 
friends of G. P., with its 'give and take' in lit- 
tle incidental conversations with myself, has 
helped largely in producing a conviction of the 
actual presence of the G. P. personality which 
it would be quite impossible to impart by any 
mere enumeration of verifiable statements. It 
will hardly, however, be regarded as surprising 
that the most impressive manifestations are at 



158 THE FUTURE LIFE 

the same time the most subtle and the least 
communicable. ' ' * 

Still further, not all that claims to be super- 
normal is supernormal, nor is all the genuinely 
supernormal to be regarded as evidence for the 
existence of discarnate intelligences. Shrewd 
guessing, hints unconsciously supplied by the 
sitter, fraud, conscious or unconscious, on the 
part of the psychic, the vagaries of secondary 
personality, chance coincidence, — these and 
other influences must be set aside as inadmis- 
sible before we can be sure that we are in the 
presence of the supernormal. Then, only those 
incidents or facts supernormally communicated 
that bear upon the personal identity of dead 
individuals can be accepted as relevant evi- 
dence. In a word, whether we agree or not 
with the view which some investigators believe 
to be the inevitable result of their inquiries, 
we must admit that psychical research is a 
genuinely scientific movement. It makes pains- 
taking efforts to get at the facts, and as a rule, 
allows theory to wait on experiment. Indeed, 
the critic who would most effectively deal a 
blow at the " spiritistic" hypothesis, will find 
the best weapon for that purpose in a careful 
perusal of Psychical Eesearch journals and 

1 Proceedings, Vol. XIII. 



THE ARGUMENT FROM RESEARCH 159 

proceedings. For masterpieces of dialectical 
skill I know not where one could better go than 
to these volumes which for the most part 
gather dust on forgotten shelves. 

In the next chapter will be given some speci- 
mens of the sort of evidence which the 
psychical researcher offers in support of his 
contention. The reader must have in mind 
that to do justice even to these narratives, it 
is necessary to study them as they are fully set 
forth in the original sources of information, and 
further, that the evidence now accumulated is 
so bulky that few men can afford the requisite 
time to study it. Various books giving selec- 
tions from this literature have been published, 
the earliest and greatest of which is F. W. H. 
Myers's Survival of Human Personality After 
Bodily Death. The evidence is not all in by 
any means, but enough is open to the study of 
those who are interested in the problems in- 
volved to force the issue of causation. It 
would appear that there are at present only 
two possible hypotheses: either we must accept 
a far-reaching doctrine of telepathy, or, we 
must hold that under certain conditions, an oc- 
casional message, at least, gets through to our 
world from the realms beyond. There does not 
appear to be any escape from the choice thus 



160 THE FUTURE LIFE 

thrust upon us, yet, whether we accept one or 
other, doubts and difficulties beset us. In the 
view of the present writer it is a case of bal- 
ancing probabilities. 

1. The telepathic hypothesis. 

By "telepathy" is meant the transmission of 
thought or feeling from mind to mind independ- 
ently of the recognized channels of sense. It 
will be noted that there is nothing explanatory 
in this definition or description. The word 
"telepathy" is a convenient symbol to cover 
coincidences between living minds not due to 
chance ; but we have not even an inkling of the 
process by which these coincidences come 
about. In calling in telepathy as an explana- 
tion, we appear to be appealing from the 
obscure to the still more obscure. Speaking 
generally, "official" science rejects as pure 
fancy the alleged facts connoted by the term. 
For example, Professor Armstrong, who writes 
a postscript to Mr. Clodd's If a Man Die 
Shall He Live Again?, brackets together 
"telepathy" and "spiritualism" and de- 
nounces both as popular superstitions. There 
is no such thing (he holds) as action of mind 
upon mind apart from the recognized chan- 
nels of sense, except such as are explicable by 
shrewd guessing. We have, as a result, the 



THE ARGUMENT FROM RESEARCH 161 

amusing spectacle of distinguished men of 
science appealing to telepathy in order to 
render the spiritistic theory superfluous, and of 
equally distinguished men of science rejecting 
telepathy as unproved and (as some think) 
unprovable. To make confusion worse con- 
founded such a competent investigator as Mrs. 
Henry Sidgwick believes not only in telepathy 
as generally understood but extends the process 
to the world beyond the grave and maintains 
that the only satisfactory interpretation of the 
facts implies that the living can receive 
telepathic impressions from the dead. In other 
words, telepathy instead of being a rival to 
spiritism may turn out to be its ally in the 
sense that it points to a mental phenomenon 
explicable only through the agency of discar- 
nate intelligences. Even if we admit with such 
a high authority as Professor W. MacDougall 
that the "reality of telepathy is of such a 
nature as to compel the assent of any com- 
petent person who studies it impartially," * we 
still must ask, How is it possible? What must 
we assume in order to explain it? 

The present situation of the telepathic hy- 
pothesis may be described thus: (1) It is 
accepted by the great majority of those who 

1 Body and Mind, p. 349. 



162 THE FUTURE LIFE 

have made prolonged investigation, as a con- 
venient way of stating that active conditions of 
two living minds may be transmitted from one 
to the other by some supernormal path as yet 
unknown. (2) It is rejected by academic 
science as unnecessary, since the alleged facts 
are illusory. (3) It is accepted by many as a 
rival to the spiritistic hypothesis, as competent 
to explain all the undoubted facts of psychical 
research so far as these seem to point to a 
transcendental cause. (4) Finally, it is ac- 
cepted by some experimenters as a process not 
only of incarnate minds but of minds dis- 
carnate, and as hinting at a law governing all 
spiritual intelligences throughout the entire 
universe. The fatal weakness of telepathy as 
an adequate explanation is that it is necessary 
to ascribe to it a selective power which no ex- 
periments or spontaneous phenomena reveal. 
So far as experimentation has gone there is 
not a shred of evidence to lead us to suppose 
that one mind can penetrate the subconscious 
depths of another mind, and pick out of a 
myriad elements those that are relevant to the 
establishment of personal identity. 

2. The spiritistic hypothesis. 

This view has the advantages of simplicity, 
ability to explain, and agreement with what we 



THE ARGUMENT FROM RESEARCH 163 

know of the powers of consciousness. On the 
other hand, there are obstacles to its unre- 
served acceptance. To begin with, the silence 
or apparent silence of all the ages as to any- 
authentic message from the world beyond 
raises a powerful presumption that the spirit- 
messages of today are to be explained by some 
mysterious forces of the receiver's psychic 
organism. To this it is replied that such 
silence is a mere assumption, that on the con- 
trary the experience of the race testifies to the 
reality of communication with the other world, 
but that prejudice, preconceptions, and a mate- 
rialistic bias have dulled the minds of the 
majority, and prevented them from impartially 
weighing the facts. 

Then, again, in many of the phenomena there 
is a curious mixture of truth and error. It 
was this perplexing fact that led William 
James now to a favourable and now to an un- 
favourable judgment. In his Report on Mrs. 
Piper's Hodgson-control, he says: "I myself 
feel as if an external will to communicate ivere 
probably there, that is, I find myself doubting, 
in consequence of my whole acquaintance with 
that sphere of phenomena, that Mrs. Piper's 
dream-life, even equipped with ' telepathic' 
powers, accounts for all the results found. But 



164 THE FUTURE LIFE 

if asked, whether the will to communicate be 
Hodgson's, or be some mere spirit-counterfeit 
of Hodgson, I remain uncertain and await more 
facts." 1 Just at the point when the correct 
answer to a test-question is of vital impor- 
tance, the supposed communicator is silent or 
finds it convenient to plead an engagement 
elsewhere, or in some instances makes a reply 
which turns out to be incorrect. In order to 
blunt the force of this objection, our attention 
is called to the fact that what primarily de- 
mands explanation is not the chaff but the 
precious grain, and to the further fact that in 
any hypothesis, any message from the tran- 
scendental realm must be coloured by the sub- 
conscious activities of the psychic. 

Perhaps the objection which weighs most 
heavily with the average man is the assumed 
triviality of the messages. Even admitting, he 
says, the reality of the communications, of what 
use are they? What do they tell us which we 
do not know? Is it not passing strange that 
these intelligences have nothing to tell us of 
the conditions of the sphere which they in- 
habit? The psychical researcher replies: All 
the messages are not trivial, and even the 
trivial have their value as marks of identifica- 

1 Proceedings of American S.P.R., Vol. Ill, pp. 588, 589. 



THE ARGUMENT FROM RESEARCH 165 

tion. But the non-trivial messages such as 
those recorded, for example, in Miss Cameron's 
Seven Purposes, are not open to verifica- 
tion, and may by the critic be explained as sub- 
conscious fabrications. It is hard to see how 
this difficulty can be overcome. Finally, the 
popular mind is deeply influenced by the 
failure of such men as the late Dr. Richard 
Hodgson and Mr. F. W. H. Myers to fulfil 
their promise to communicate the contents of 
sealed letters which they left under stringent 
guardianship. One may doubt, however, 
whether such a proceeding constitutes a real 
test. Suppose Mr. Myers had revealed the 
contents of his sealed letter, would any hard- 
ened sceptic have felt shaken in his unbelief? 
In all probability, he would have sought help 
from the long arm of coincidence or have taken 
refuge in clairvoyance, that is, the transcen- 
dental perception of hidden objects. 

On the whole, the layman cannot but feel 
that up to the present time the more probable 
of the two hypotheses is the spiritistic. The 
very least we must acknowledge is that the 
psychical researcher has made out a good case 
for himself, and has established the probability 
that ultimately his thesis will be proved to the 
satisfaction of all competent judges. 



CHAPTER IX 

SPECIMENS OF THE EVIDENCE SUPPLIED BY 
PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 

In order that the reader may be enabled to 
judge for himself the sort of evidence which 
the Psychical Research Society is slowly ac- 
cumulating, a few typical illustrations, selected 
for the most part from the society's literature, 
are here set forth. It must be borne in mind 
that a great many more incidents and cases of 
equal evidential value could be extracted from 
the voluminous reports of the society, but con- 
siderations of space forbid. Perhaps the most 
convincing book in the entire literature of the 
Movement is the thirteenth volume of the Pro- 
ceedings, which contains the famous Hodgson 
Report of his own and others' sittings with Mrs. 
Piper. The study of this volume will compel 
thoughtful persons to admit one of two hy- 
potheses to be true : either this New England 
woman of average education develops under 
certain conditions a power of dramatization 
comparable with that of Shakespeare or of 

166 



EVIDENCE OF RESEARCH 167 

Balzac, or, we are in the presence of phenom- 
ena that point to some such doctrine as the 
spiritistic theorists contend for. But Mrs. 
Piper has fellow-dramatists of equal power — 
if this be the horn of the dilemma we prefer 
— and it is from one of these that our first 
testimony shall be taken. 

THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS 1 

This piece of evidence, reported by the Right 
Hon. Gerald W. Balfour, has attracted con- 
siderable attention, particularly among persons 
of literary and classical education. It is not 
weightier than many others of more direct and 
simple character, but, if from discarnate 
sources, it illustrates the variety of ways by 
which the living beyond the veil are endeavour- 
ing to demonstrate to the living on this side. 
And it must be admitted that this kind of proof 
attempted is of the precise sort which would 
have been congenial to the eminent Greek 
scholar of the University of Cambridge, Pro- 
fessor A. E. Verrall, and his friend S. H. 
Butcher, professor of Greek in the University 
of Edinburgh, who are the purported com- 
municators. 

1 Proceedings of the English Society for Psychical Research, 
Vol. XXIX, pp. 197-243, 260-286. 



168 THE FUTURE LIFE 

Mrs. Willett, with whom the English Society 
has had many experiments, was the automatist, 
the messages coming mainly in writing, partly 
by voice, and mostly while in a state of trance. 
One mysterious phrase, "Dionysius Ear the 
lobe," came in 1910, and nothing more which 
seemed related until January 10, 1914, when a 
number of fragmentary quotations and scat- 
tered classical allusions, seemingly having little 
relation to each other, were written. All the 
after members of the series were written when 
Mrs. Willett was in trance and were not shown 
to her until the series, comprising three long 
groups of sentences, separated by considerable 
intervals, and one brief congratulatory finale, 
was completed. 

Prominent among the topics to which various 
allusions were made was the "Ear of Diony- 
sius," the designation for a certain grotto at 
Syracuse, opening on a stone quarry, where 
Athenian prisoners were kept, and where after- 
wards Dionysius, Tyrant of Syracuse, was said 
to have been able, on account of the peculiar 
acoustic qualities of the place, to listen to what 
his captives said. But there were also multi- 
form references to the story of Polyphemus and 
Ulysses, and the story of Acis and Galatea, to 
Jealousy, to something to be found in Aris- 



EVIDENCE OF RESEARCH 169 

totle's Poetics, etc., etc., the allusions pursuing 
the several topics through classical authors 
especially and also to an extent through modern 
poets. But almost to the end there appeared 
to be little connection between these various 
themes, or reason why they should reiteratedly 
be grouped together. Yet it was early intimated 
that there was unity yet to appear, and it was 
expressly declared that a deliberate purpose 
was back of the scripts. " There are two people 
in that literary thing, chiefly concerned in it. 
They're very close friends, they've thought it 
out together." And it was unmistakably inti- 
mated that the two were the Greek scholars, 
Professors Verrall and Butcher. 

Suddenly, though delayed as if to give those 
in whose hands the script was a chance to work 
out the problem for themselves, and with an air 
of surprise natural to the specialist who dis- 
covers that he has talked "over the heads" of 
his auditors, the key was given which unlocked 
the mystery, and unity was achieved. The key 
was the fragmentary word "Philox." The 
classical dictionaries show that there was a 
Syracusan poet Philoxenus, whose name very 
few but the most learned pundits of Greek 
literature would recognize. Even Mrs. Ver- 
rall, an accomplished classical scholar, did not 



170 THE FUTURE LIFE 

remember him. Very few lines of his sur- 
vive. 

But the classical dictionaries, as a rule, do not 
give the details which bind together the most 
important topics and allusions of the script. At 
last a share of them were found in Lempriere's 
Classical Dictionary, and a greater number in a 
rare and recondite book by Dr. H. W. Smith, on 
the Greek Melic Poets. These two paragraphs 
found respectively in the named books suf- 
ficiently demonstrate the unity as found in the 
experiences and works of Philoxenus, but even 
here not all the pertinent classical allusions of 
the script are to be found. So that, if Mrs. 
Willett had consulted either or both of these 
books she could not have found all the facts 
which came out. 

Mrs. Willett is not a classical scholar. She 
is very well known to the investigators, who 
are satisfied that the range of classical knowl- 
edge displayed in the script is enormously be- 
yond what she is capable of having absorbed in- 
cidentally to general reading and equally well 
satisfied that she never consulted the authorities 
mentioned, which would have been insufficient 
even if she had. 

But certain allusions in the script were such 
as would have been congenial to the studies of 



EVIDENCE OF RESEARCH 171 

Professor Butcher, others to Professor Verrall. 
Besides, and it seems a significant coincidence, 
it was found that Smith's Greek Melic Poets 
was in Professor VerralPs library and was used 
by him in his college lectures. 

Professor Verrall was interested in his life- 
time in the experiments for cross-correspond- 
ence, which dealt largely with classical ma- 
terials. It seems probable that, his interest 
continuing after his death, his own communi- 
cations would take some such form as we 
actually find. But to learn the real strength 
of the argument that back of these scripts lay 
a "will to communicate" on the part of classi- 
cal scholars who have passed beyond, the reader 
must go to the full report. One feature of this 
is what looks like cross-correspondences be- 
tween the Willett script and that of another 
automatist, dealing with the same group of 
references. 



TWO SAMPLE "CROSS-CORRESPONDENCES" 

The English Society of late years has con- 
ducted many experiments in "cross-correspond- 
ences" in which the communicating spirits are 
supposed to get the same test word, phrase, or 
thought into the script of different automatists 



172 THE FUTUEE LIFE 

at a distance from each other, none of them 
allowed to see the script of the others, all of it 
being sent to the headquarters of the society as 
received. Mrs. Piper in Edgbaston, England; 
Mrs. Verrall, widow of Professor A. E. Verrall 
of Cambridge University, and herself a scholar 
of distinction, in Cambridge, England; Miss 
Verrall alone in Cambridge ; and Mrs. Holland 
in India ; these were the chief psychics involved. 
Mrs. Holland did not know even that any such 
experiments were being conducted. 

It is almost impossible to cite any of the 
results in brief space, in a way that will be 
intelligible, and quite hopeless to do so with- 
out diminishing the evidential force. 

The St. Paul Cross-Correspondence. 1 On 
November 15, 1906, Sir Oliver Lodge proposed 
to the purported Dr. Hodgson, who was com- 
municating through the hand of the entranced 
Mrs. Piper in Edgbaston, that a test of the kind 
should be made, and Hodgson, assenting, said 
that he would go to Mrs. Holland and try to 
make "St. Paul" come out in her writing. 

On December 31st, Mrs. Holland's hand 
wrote in India without break the following, ex- 



1 See Journal of British Society for Psychical Research, July, 
19 17- January, 1918, or Journal of American Society, Septem- 
ber, 1917. 



EVIDENCE OF RESEARCH 173 

cept the parenthetic figures, which we prefix 
for ease of reference. 



(1) II Peter 1,15. 

(2) This witness is true. 

(3) It is time that the shadow should be lifted 
from your spirit. 

(4) Let patience have her perfect work. 

(5) This is a faithful saying. 

These sentences, with their references to 
"this witness," "time that the shadow should 
be lifted, " "patience,' ' and "faithful saying, " 
have a significant sound, as though attention 
were being called to something. But to what, 
Mrs. Holland did not know. 

Paragraph 2 was written by St. Paul (Titus 
1, 13), paragraph 3 is reminiscent of a passage 
by St. Paul and of none other in the Bible 
(Romans 13, 11), and paragraph 4 is a sen- 
tence which St. Paul was fond of using (I 
Timothy 1, 15; I Timothy 4, 9; II Timothy 2, 
11; Titus 3, 8); paragraph 4 (James 1, 4) 
would have pertinence as a hint. Paragraph 1 
seems to be irrelevant. The name of St. Paul 
appears to be lacking. 

But later, January 12, 1907, in Cambridge, 
Miss Verrall's hand wrote : 



174 THE FUTURE LIFE 

"The name is not right robbing Peter to pay — 
Paul? Sanctus nomine quod efficit nil continens 
petatur surveniet." [Let a saint be sought contain- 
ing in his name that which effects nothing, he will 
come to aid.] 

And on February 26th Miss Verrall got: 

"You have not understood about Paul, ask Lodge. 
Quibus eruditis advocatis rem explicabis non nisi 
ad unam normam refers hoc satis alia vana." [By 
calling to your aid what learned men will you explain 
the matter unless you carry it to one norm? This 
is sufficient, all else is useless.] 

Here are two references to St. Paul by name, 
and the suggestion "ask Lodge." Does it not 
look as though failing to get the name agreed 
on with Lodge, the communicator had turned to 
another automatist? "Let a saint be sought 
containing in his name that which effects noth- 
ing. ' ' Can we refuse on such hints to examine 
the name "Paul" and find in it the root pauo 
meaning to cease, come to an end— a procedure 
the opposite of "patience" and which is pretty 
sure to effect nothing? "The name is not 
right," "let a saint be sought" — where? Does 
not "robbing Peter to pay — Paul" furnish a 
hint that the passage from Peter in Mrs. 



EVIDENCE OF RESEAECH 175 

Holland's script, otherwise full of Paul, is 
meant ? 

Turning in that direction we find that there is 
one passage in the Epistles of Peter which 
names Paul, which is likewise the one passage 
in all the New Testament Epistles which names 
him, which is likewise the one passage in the 
entire New Testament which best describes 
him, and that is II Peter 3, 15, "And account 
that the long-suffering of the Lord is salvation; 
even as our beloved brother Paul according to 
the wisdom given unto him hath written unto 
you." And we discover that II Peter 3, 15 
differs from the citation as written II Peter 
1, 15 by but one figure. Considering the many 
indications that an auditory process is often 
involved in the transmission of words through 
a psychic, it is important to note that of all the 
other ordinals "third" is most likely to be mis- 
taken for "first" in speech. Can all this be the 
result of accident? Many will conclude, after 
they consider all the interlacing hints in the 
Verrall script — more than we have mentioned 
— that II Peter 3, 15 was meant to be given Mrs. 
Holland, and that this is the "norm" which, 
once discovered, would " explain the matter" 
which concerned Lodge. 

But if that conclusion is correct, it completely 



176 THE FUTURE LIFE 

excludes the telepathic theory, since not a per- 
son concerned in the tests ever suspected where 
the implied error lay, or that there was an error. 
Not a living person knew it, and the "norm" 
was not observed and brought into place for 
years after the incident was first reported. But 
some one knew what the "norm" was, and that 
it had not been traced, and the some one who 
dictated Miss VerralPs script gave clue upon 
clue which, had "patience had its perfect 
work," would have earlier linked together the 
passages. 

The Hope, Star, and Browning Cross-Corre- 
spondence. 1 Mrs. Verrall, automatically writ- 
ing when alone, wrote, on January 23rd, 1907 : 

Justice Jiolds the scales 

That gives the words but an anagram would be 
better. 

Tell him that — rats star tars and so on. Try this 

It has been tried before RTATS rearrange these 
[evidently an error] five letters or again tears 
stare . . . 

And on January 28th her script began: 

ASTER [Greek for star} 

TERAS [anagram on aster; meaning wonder or a 

sign]. 

1 Proceedings of British Society for Psychical Research, 
Vol. XXII, 59-77. 



EVIDENCE OF RESEARCH 177 

And in the short passage which followed were 
several broken extracts from Browning's 
poetry, the word "hope" being emphasized by- 
being substituted for the original word " pas- 
sion" in the poem. 

On February 11th Mr, Piddington sitting 
with Mrs. Piper was pointedly informed by 
"Myers" that a cross-correspondence had 
been attempted through Mrs. Verrall and, asked 
what it was, after a little confusion answered, 

I referred to Hope and Browning. 

(Yes.) 

I also said Star. 

• • • • • • ■• 

Look out for Hope Star and Browning. 

Not until after this was search made in Mrs. 
Verrall's script received by the Society, with 
the result already given. 

But again a third automatist, who had been 
told nothing, had a part. Miss Verrall on Feb- 
ruary 3rd was impelled to draw automatically a 
crescent and a star and to write with no in- 
telligible context "the crescent moon and the 
star." Later too she was told that a five letter 
anagram had been part of a success on January 
28, — nothing more. On February 17th she got 
a drawing of a star (without the crescent) and 



178 THE FUTURE LIFE 

the appended sentence, "that was the sign she 
will understand when she sees it." Of several 
following brief phrases these were three : 

"No arts prevail 

and a star above it all 

rats every where in Hamelin town 

Now do you understand" 

Miss Verrall's script did not, then, take the 
hint of "five letters" (aster), but gave the four 
letter English version of the same word. Be- 
sides she wrote anagrams on star, namely, 
"arts" and "rats," as Mrs. Verrall's script had 
done on January 28th in her "rats, star, tars 
and so on." And be it remembered that the 
"rats everywhere in Hamelin town" is a refer- 
ence to a Browning poem, this time by Miss 
Verrall. 

It w T ould seem as though we had a good triple 
cross-correspondence. But it was really a quad- 
ruple one. Hodgson was supposed to be helping 
in the communications. It was actually dis- 
covered that among the papers left by Dr. 
Hodgson in his desk at the time of his death 
were scraps of paper whereon he had jotted 
down the series "STAR, TABS, BATS, ABTS, 
TBAS, ' ' of which portions had come out in the 



EVIDENCE OF RESEARCH 179 

script of both Mrs. Verrall and Miss Verrall, 
also the series, "RATES, STARE, TEARS, 
TARES,' ' partly given in the script of Mrs. 
Verrall. 

The full text of this cross-correspondence is 
richer in suggestiveness than the condensation 
indicates. But even here, does it not look as 
though a mind or minds conceived and presided 
over the concurrent phenomena ? 

THE AMAZING STORY OP DORIS FISHER 

What is now known as the "Doris Case" has 
two parts. The first part is the history of the 
young woman as perhaps the most remarkable 
of the yet observed cases of "multiple per- 
sonality,' 1 and the record of her cure/ 1 ) * the 
second part is the record of a series of experi- 
ments begun after her cure was accomplished, 
with Doris as the sitter and Mrs. Chenoweth, 
who may perhaps be called the successor of Mrs. 
Piper, as the writing psychic. < 2 > In order to 
appreciate in some degree the evidential value 
of the excerpts which we are to make from the 
latter record, it will be necessary to glance at 
the earlier phase of the case. 

" Dissociation,' 9 which is a phenomenon of 

* Numbers like this refer to notes on pp. 208-10. 



180 THE FUTURE LIFE 

very rare occurrence, but recognized by all 
modern psychologists, consists (employing the 
psychologically orthodox explanation) in a As- 
suring of the mind, much as the main branches 
of a tree part from the trunk, into two sub- 
sistences, in which case they are called "dual 
personalities," or into more than two, which are 
accordingly known as "multiple personalities.' ' 
The latter phenomenon is the rarer, and pre- 
sents the appearance of the person changing, 
mentally and in some respects physically, into 
now one and now another of several other per- 
sons. The simile of the branches of a tree fails 
in that these "persons" are not on a par, for 
one, known as the primary personality, is 
what is left of the original total mentality, with 
what might be called rights of restoration; 
while the others, denominated secondary per- 
sonalities, are in a sense parasitical interlopers, 
brought by some shock or strain to a predis- 
posed individual. Let it be distinctly under- 
stood that these are not moods, or fancies, but 
real mental entities, which science no longer 
questions. Nor is the meaning that the afflicted 
party at one time feels like one person, and at 
another time feels like another person. There 
are really several distinct consciousnesses which 
irregularly take turns in being in evidence. To 



EVIDENCE OF RESEARCH 181 

the uninitiated spectator there indeed appear 
to be strange and extreme changes of mood and 
behaviour, accompanied by a "play-acting" 
ability to alter the voice, facial expression, etc., 
to suit, and a disregard for truth evidenced by 
contradicting stories and claims. But it is a 
fact that each personality has a different con- 
sciousness, will, memory, range of ideas and 
tastes, and a different set of bodily reactions in 
the form of individual facial and vocal expres- 
sion and individual peculiarities of sensation, 
hearing, vision, etc. 

At the time that Doris was discovered by 
Mrs. Prince and taken in hand by Dr. Walter F. 
Prince, she had five personalities including the 
primary one. But previous to the death of her 
mother in 1906, there were three (if "Sleeping 
Margaret" was a personality and not, as she 
has since claimed, a spirit), of which two were 
of such nature as to then manifest themselves to 
beholders. These were the primary personality 
afterwards known as the Real Doris, and the 
secondary personality, who came to be called 
"Margaret." By turns during the day these 
came "out" and conducted affairs. But "Mar- 
garet" had the advantage that when she was 
subliminal or "in" she was co-conscious, so that 
when she came "out" with a snap of the neck, 



182 THE FUTURE LIFE 

she knew just what to do or say in order to 
carry things along smoothly, while poor "Real 
Doris' ' was unconscious when "in" and if sud- 
denly summoned into consciousness by the dis- 
appearance of "Margaret" often had to "fish," 
to "mark time," and to employ devices to orient 
herself, making blunders at that and incurring 
blame for her supposed wilfulness or falsity. 
"Margaret" never developed beyond the men- 
tality of a very sagacious child of ten. So that 
in the last year of the mother's life, she was 
used to seeing her daughter at times behaving 
after the fashion of a young lady of seventeen 
and at other times like a romping child given 
to dolls and sports, always fond yet at times 
obedient and at other times roguishly heedless, 
now showing a comprehension suitable to her 
age, but again betraying an almost infantile be- 
lief in fairies and in the advent of babies in a 
doctor's satchel. 

The case, complicated by a fourth personal- 
ity at the shock of the mother's death, and by a 
fifth a year later, was taken in hand in 1911 and 
by stages in a treatment of three and a half 
years, during which Dr. W. F. Prince never was 
absent twenty-four consecutive hours, was re- 
stored to normality. One thing more. Not only 
was a daily diary of the progress of the case 



EVIDENCE OF RESEARCH 183 

kept during the three and a half years, but a 
large number of facts and incidents, gathered 
from the conversations of the several person- 
alities, were set down. So that there was a 
written record of many facts utterly unknown 
to the reconstructed Doris, since none of the 
memories of " Margaret," who consumed what 
would amount to several years of her life, ever 
have emerged in her consciousness. Doris was 
adopted by Dr. and Mrs. Prince and still has 
her home with them. 



Conditions of the Experiments with Mrs. 
Chenoweth 

Five months after her cure, in October, 1914, 
Doris crossed the continent alone, to be the 
sitter in a series of experiments with Mrs. 
Chenoweth of Boston. This was done pursuant 
to the request of Dr. Hyslop, and the experi- 
ments were conducted under his management. 

There were some peculiar advantages in 
selecting her as a subject, and also absolute 
safeguards. 

1. Doris was utterly unknown to the public. 
Not a line had then been printed about her. 

2. She was born and had spent the most of 
her life in Pittsburgh, some five hundred miles 



184 THE FUTUEE LIFE 

from Boston, and had been living in California, 
three thousand miles away. 

3. Of course Dr. Hyslop never mentioned the 
girl to Mrs. Chenoweth, who had never heard 
of her. 

4. Dr. Hyslop had never seen her but once, 
and knew almost nothing of her earlier history. 
There had been only one or two brief meetings 
between him and Dr. Prince. 

5. According to methods regularly employed, 
Doris was not admitted into the room where 
Mrs. Chenoweth was until the latter was in a 
trance, seated with an arm on the writing-board. 
Moreover the sitter was invariably seated be- 
hind the psychic and not allowed to utter a 
word. Later she did once forget and utter a 
few words, which, had it occurred earlier, would 
have betrayed her sex, but she had already been 
identified as the daughter of a purported com- 
municator. 

6. The condition out of which Doris had 
lately emerged, also, marked her as an interest- 
ing subject for such experiments. Could the 
communicators or any of them, professing to 
have known her, correctly describe that condi- 
tion, so peculiar and rare ? 

Certain critics have drawn upon their imag- 
ination so far as to suggest that during sucE 



EVIDENCE OF RESEAECH 185 

experiments Dr. Hyslop probably gives involun- 
tary hints to the psychic by vocal intonations, 
starts, exclamations, and other eloquent mani- 
festations of emotion. This is laughable to one 
who has watched his demeanour at such times, 
which is as uniform and monotonous as the 
movements of a machine, as devoid of indica- 
tions as the face of the stone Sphinx. Every 
word uttered in the room is set down and forms 
a part of the published report, except the exact 
repetition aloud by Dr. Hyslop of each word as 
it is written. 

Did Doris's Mother Prove Her Identity? 

It is impossible to convey, in this abridged 
account, an adequate conception of the richness 
of the matter contained in the purported com- 
munications from the sitter's mother. The 
reader must go to the full report for that. But 
at least the excerpts and condensations shall be 
fair, and not minimize such errors and inco- 
herences as at least superficially appear to 
exist. The same spirit of fairness, however, 
compels us to admit that in estimating seeming 
errors, a certain though small allowance should 
be made for failure of memory on the part of 
the living, and will compel us to acknowledge 



186 THE FUTURE LIFE 

that certain of the incoherences and confusions 
are themselves evidential. 

The first words written after Doris silently 
entered (November 9) and seated herself in the 
background were ' ' John E. ' ' It afterwards ap- 
peared that her maternal grandfather was the 
communicator/ 4 ) but the name set down was 
that of the father of Doris. In an instant, how- 
ever, another communicator interposed with 
"May I come?" and declaring that her father 
was present (note that both she and her father 
were in fact deceased, though the youth of the 
sitter, even had she been seen by the psychic, 
would have made both facts doubtful) soon 
added, "Mother is glad to come here to 
you." 

Then appeared the claim "I have been at 
home with you dear. ... I mean with you 
personally and directly, first-hand I mean. 
This is different but I take the time to make 
some clearer statements if I can than I have 
made before." It is true that there had been 
superficial evidence of the presence of the 
mother in the home of the daughter and of 
direct touch with her. Doris twice saw an 
apparition of her mother/ 5 ) on one of which 
occasions she was caused to look up by seeing 
the shadow before she perceived the figure it- 



EVIDENCE OF EESEAECH 187 

self. There had also been a few experiments 
with the planchette in which writing purporting 
to be from the mother was received. Both ap- 
paritions and planchette writing are different 
from pencil scrip through an unconscious psy- 
chic. Some difficulty now ensued in the Cheno- 
weth script, what appeared to be "h" "W W 
W ' ' and " M " being written, but then absolutely 
spontaneously came "She is my child, " thus 
correctly indicating the sex of the sitter. It was 
after this, when the words "My being so cold" 
were read aloud by Dr. Hyslop, that Doris for- 
got and said "She died of pneumonia.' ' But 
the exclamation came too late to do appreciable 
harm. Presently the hand wrote "Violets I 
still love." They were in fact Mrs. Fisher's 
favourite flower. "I remember them at the 
funeral. ' ' Dr. Hyslop here looked at Doris and 
she silently nodded. The writing went on with- 
out break "with the white roses." Soon after 
the control broke down. There were other 
partly-evidential allusions in the sitting for 
which we have no space here. Nothing profess- 
ing to come from this communicator had been 
irrelevant and nothing intelligible expressed 
had been provably incorrect or unlikely. But 
Doris was strongly of the opinion that there 
were no white roses at her mother's funeral, 



188 THE FUTURE LIFE 

and so stated to Dr. Hyslop after the sitting. 
Not she, but the " Margaret' ' personality, none 
of whose memories survived in her, had been 
present at the funeral, but she thought she 
remembered hearing of white lilies, but not of 
roses. It was afterwards proved, however, that 
the communicator was right and the sitter 
wrong. The faded remnant of the very roses, 
which were held in the dead hands, have been 
traced, still with the florist's wire about the 
stems. 

The second and short communication from 
Mrs. Fisher (November 10) must be almost 
passed over, but not because it presents diffi- 
culties. It is all relevant and a number of 
small evidential details appear. Among these 
are the statement, "I have been able to show 
myself on two or three occasions," and the 
expression, "I want to say a word about baby, 
my baby." We have already remarked that 
Doris saw an apparition of her mother twice. 
And " baby," a curious term to apply to a young 
lady of 22, happens to be what Mrs. Fisher often 
called this her youngest child. But more re- 
markable is the fact that the communicator used 
the word " guard" to designate the office of 
certain spirits supposed to be placed for the 
protection and aid of the girl. Now, this rather 



EVIDENCE OF RESEAKCH 189 

than the more familiar term " guide" is just 
the word which had invariably appeared in 
the planchette script through the sitter her- 
self in California. It was the first time that 
Mrs. Cheno we th's hand had been known to 
write the word " guard' ' in that sense. 

In the first two sittings the communicator 
made references to the u nervous make-up' ' and 
sensitiveness of her daughter, and to her need 
of care and protection at the time of her own 
death. Another such reference in the third sit- 
ting (November 11) warranted Dr. Hyslop in 
asking what was the matter with the girl. The 
reply was very pertinent. 

"I do not know what you refer to. If you mean the 
physical condition, I should say not that so much as a 
childlike dependence mentally which needed all my 
care and foresight to keep her as she ought to be and 
there was no one else who understood her. ' ' 

Any one who reads the full account will see 
how strikingly correct this is. The trouble as it 
had been known to the mother was not physical 
but mental, "the childlike dependence' ' result- 
ing from the personality "Margaret." The 
mother had not understood the case technically, 
but she understood how to deal with it as no 
one else had, and there was nothing about the 



190 THE FUTURE LIFE 

girl's present condition, even had Mrs. Cheno- 
weth been able to observe it, which hinted at 
the past state. 

1 'The play with other children was never as chil- 
dren usually play, but was left as a part of my care 
for her. We were companions, my little one, in a 
strange way and her mind was always so quick to 
see my meaning when to others she could not or would 
not respond, and there was a delicate feebleness, as 
some might call it, a slow development. ' ' 

This is an extraordinary passage fitting an 
extraordinary case. The child could not play 
with other children unless she ("Margaret") 
was allowed to be autocrat. Hence she usually 
played alone or with her mother, who fully 
entered into the spirit of the peculiar sport, 
and thus was a companion "in a strange way." 
By endless patience and forbearance she was 
able to get along with both manifestations, 
which by their odd alterations and blendings 
must have made her wonder if her daughter 
would ever grow up. Even "Real Doris" was 
shy and backward with strangers. 

Pressed to give details, the communicator not 
unnaturally demurred, saying that those things 
should remain between her and her daughter, 
but aptly added, "It was some things she said 



EVIDENCE OF RESEARCH 191 

as well as things she did. ' ' But she yielded and 
wrote : 

I want to refer to the running away to other places. 

(Yes, tell of some of the places.) 

It was a matter of worry to have her do that. It 
was not only that she went but she would not come 
back, and there were things said at the time to try 
and make her understand it. I do not know now why. 

(Can you say or tell some particular place where 
she would go and worry you?) 

Yes, I am aware of the things that happened then 
and of my fears and constant watching for the return 
and of the real danger that might have come to her if 
she had got into the place, she would have been 
drowned. 

All this is peculiarly true. The mother must 
have been disturbed by " things she said," as 
when the personalities contradicted each other. 
And often as "Margaret" she would go on some 
long tramp, perhaps returning late at night. 
Often the "Margaret" personality w r ould dash 
into the river, clothes and all, and would swim 
underneath a dry-dock, etc. This last was a 
specially dangerous place. Observe that the 
mother does "not know now why" she could 
not make her daughter take understanding heed. 
Throughout, this communication showed knowl- 



192 THE FUTURE LIFE 

edge of the past behaviour of her daughter but 
not of the nature and cause of it. 

"She was so much a child without the least sense 
of danger and I thought no one else would take the 
care of her that I did. Why I used to play with her 
and walk about doing my work and talking with her, 
and she would answer until suddenly I would get no 
answer and she was out of sight and then I had my 
worry.' ' 

All exactly true as set forth with many illus- 
trations in the Report. 

A passage in which there is evident confusion 
seems to say that the girl's father was dead, 
which was not correct, but it is not certain what 
was meant. Then a reference came to an " Aunt 
J," said to have felt some concern about Doris, 
which was true of her Aunt Jennie. Immedi- 
ately followed reference to " Charles " and 
" Helen," the latter said to be alive and to 
have "had some association" with the sitter. 
Charles was the name of a deceased brother and 
Helen that of a friend who was not living but 
had died less than three weeks before. Are we 
bound to suppose that a spirit, every time an 
acquaintance dies anywhere, knows it at once? 

In the next communication (November 16) 
came a reference to "Mary, Mamie." Doris 



EVIDENCE OF RESEARCH 193 

has a sister called Mary but never called Mamie. 
And then a reference to an aunt, later stated to 
be the communicator's own sister, to "our" 
mother (meaning the mother of the sisters) on 
the other side and to a "J" and the remark 
that the aunt would know who " J " is. The fact 
is that the aunt referred to (Marie) did feel 
some perplexity about the adoption of Doris 
into the Prince family, suspecting she was to 
be made a drudge. And she formerly had a 
little nephew James, of whom she had been very 
fond, but who died. The grandmother of the 
sitter was also in fact dead. 

After the mention of her own mother the com- 
municator proceeded : 

''I have something to say also about some things 
that were left in the care of one who is in the old 
home. I mean the home where I used to live. Some 
things that have been kept for her and are still kept. 
I refer to a trinket that was not of such value, but 
was mine and being mine was kept. There are two 
women interested in what I shall write here, and ] 
think each will know about the ring of which I write 



i > 



The fact is that the mother of Doris made a 
romantic, runaway marriage, and so incurred 
the lasting ill-will of her father, which accounts 



194 THE FUTURE LIFE 

for the fact that her "trinkets" were not sent 
to her. The old home was not standing at the 
time of the sitting. Prior to its being torn 
down an uncle was living in it, and when it was 
demolished the Aunt Marie and her daughter 
found a ring and a watch which had belonged 
to Mrs. Fisher and restored them. She gave the 
ring to Doris and later the watch also came to 
the latter. 

Immediately afterwards was written : 

"Lilies were there 

(Just where?) 

At the old home where grandmother lives, Auntie 
will remember. I wish I could write about a little 
curl that was cut from baby's head and kept by me, 
not yet destroyed, very like flax, so light, and do you 
know what the Methodists are. 

(Yes) 

They are not so clear about the life here as they will 
be when they come but they mean all right. I had 
faith too, but the knowledge is better. I had in mind 
a prayer that I used to want her to say long ago, for 
I felt it important to pray and teach her to say the 
little prayer. (Can you give that prayer?) Now? 
(Yes) I lay me — prayer that most children say. 
(All right) And at the end, God bless papa, God 
bless mamma, God bless Her and make her a good 
girl." 



EVIDENCE OF RESEARCH 195 

Doris often heard her mother describe the 
border of lilies-of-the-valley around her child- 
hood home. The mother did cut a curl (the hair 
was very curly and soft and light as flax) from 
the brow of baby Doris, and it was found in a 
drawer after she died. Her family were all 
Methodists, but she became somewhat alienated 
from Methodism because of the unforgiving 
spirit of her father. 

All the children were taught to say "Now I 
lay me" and to add petitions for parents, 
brothers, and sisters in turn. But Doris (as 
"Margaret") was too impatient to go through 
the long list, and finally a compromise was 
struck word for word as the communicator says, 
if we substituted "me" for "her." 

The communicator said that she had seen 
Edith, who is unrecognized. Then came 

"I shall give my little girl's name before I leave 
here. I do not know whether today or tomorrow, but 
I think I ought to do it, so you may know I remember, 
but I had so many other names for her that I some- 
times called her one and sometimes another. Some- 
times my little Dolly, sometimes runaway, little run- 
away. You know what that means, dear? (Sitter 
nodded) (Yes she does) 

For those little feet could not be trusted to stay 
where they were told to stay, and many talkings and 



196 THE FUTUEE LIFE 

some punishments had to be invented to keep my 
mind at rest as to where she might be, but that was 
the desire to get a larger scope I suppose. Do you 
remember the hill, down the hill to the stream. 

(Give the name of the stream) 

Yes and C. A, yes A. 

Doris says, "Mother used to call me all sorts 
of names, Eunaway, Sweetheart, Curlyhead, 
Spitfire, and others I cannot think of now, be- 
sides Dolly, because my hair curled close to my 
head when it rained or was hot and made me 
look like a doll I suppose." 

What followed is also emphatically correct. 
Peculiar punishments had to be invented that 
would work with the "Margaret" phase. One 
was purposely to look grieved. As to "talk- 
ings" Doris says, "She would tell me that 
somebody would steal me, that I would get lost, 
that I would go too far and couldn't get back 
and would die on the road. ' ' 

The family lived near the Allegheny Eiver 
and a high embankment went down to it. The 
end of an old unused canal jutted into the river. 
The children called it the Canal and often 
went there to swim as well as to the river, so 
that Canal and Allegheny were conjoined terms 
to the anxious mother. The initials may refer 
to these. 



EVIDENCE OF RESEARCH 197 

On November 17th the same communicator, 
after some relevant but not specially evidential 
remarks, delivered an amazing series of inci- 
dents. 

"It is not always what I remember that I wish to 
write but also to have something which my little girl 
may remember as well as I. 

"I have been thinking about a swing out of doors 
and a step where I used to sit, I mean a doorstep 
where I sat and worked, and the swing was in sight 
of that. 

(Yes, that is recognized) [Sitter had nodded} 
"And in the swing my little girl played and had 
some pleasure, and there was also a game we played 
together, out of doors I mean and I wonder if she 
recalls a game with balls we played out of doors. 
(Yes, what was it?) [Sitter had nodded] 
"Croquet, and I wonder if she recalls how a game 
won by her always meant shouts and jumps and a 
great crowing on her part regardless of how mamma 
might feel, and I can hear that laugh and would give 
much to play again in the old way.*' 

Note the announced purpose to select inci- 
dents which her daughter would remember. 
And the incidents which followed were such as 
concerned that one of her children exclusively. 
The swing was one of their secrets used only 
when they were alone together, put up before 



198 THE FUTURE LIFE 

every performance and afterwards taken down 
and hidden away. "Real Doris" and " Mar- 
garet" only used the swing and only when the 
mother sat on the back steps and sewed or pre- 
pared vegetables or sometimes talked and sang. 
Doris played croquet only with her mother and 
the mother only with her. 

As to the behaviour after a game, Dr. Prince 
remarks : " A most realistic and lifelike descrip- 
tion of 'Margaret's' manner, w r hen exultant, as 
I so often saw her in later days. (It should be 
remembered that the ' Margaret' personality 
after developing to the physical age of about 
ten years never advanced farther.) ' Shouts/ 
1 jumps,' 'a great crowing,' ' regardless of how 
mamma might feel,' 'I can hear that laugh,' 
these graphic bits of delineation could hardly 
be improved upon. The ' regardless, etc.,' re- 
minds me vividly of the times when l Margaret' 
was delighted at some incident regardless of 
how her new papa might feel. ' ' 

The writing went on without a break : 

"Then I want to recall a walk we sometimes took 
down the road. I wonder if she recalls a pink bonnet, 
not quite a bonnet, but a little sun hat which was 
washable and which she often wore when we took our 
walk to see some one down the street. ' ' 



EVIDENCE OF EESEARCH 199 

True, Doris and her mother would "walk 
down the street" to call on an old lady, the 
very person who gave her the pink washable 
sun hat which the child often wore on these 
visits. 

Then reference was made to an uncle who 
lived near the Fishers, was "not young" and 
was called "uncle" by every one. These par- 
ticulars exactly fitted an uncle of Doris when 
she was a child. A toy piano was mentioned 
which the sitter did not recall. ( 6 ) 

"I will not speak of the numerous dolls. They were 
always in evidence and usually one in the window. 
That was a little manner that belonged to her 
peculiarly to have a doll in the window looking out." 

A little later the communicator said that these 
were paper dolls. Then the sitter who had 
shaken her head at the first reference, suppos- 
ing it to be purchased dolls, which she had never 
possessed, understood. The child and her 
mother had cut out many paper dolls and "Mar- 
garet" nearly always had one in the window 
turned towards the street as if looking out. 

"Daisy, daisy flowers. You know what I refer to. 
We used to love to get them, and do you remember 
a pet that used to follow us and we were afraid it 
would get lost." 



200 THE FUTURE LIFE 

(Yes, tell what the pet was.) [Sitter had nodded.] 
"Cat, kitty, always following everywhere. ' ' 



As in other incidents it is not so much the 
truth of the separate statements as their truth 
in combination that is striking. 

Doris and her mother used to go to some old 
estates about five squares away in order to pick 
daisies, and on these very expeditions a pet cat 
would follow part way and then turn back and 
"Margaret" would worry lest it would get lost 
and threaten in that case to beat her head 
against a post. Its name was "Kittybell," and 
perhaps " Kitty' ' following cat in the communi- 
cation was an abortive attempt to give the name. 

Other evidential items of this sitting, with one 
unremembered name, that of a little boy 
Eugene, "not a relative just a little boy we 
knew, I thought she would remember him," < 7 ) 
must be omitted. 

The next communication from Mrs. Fisher 
(December 1) mostly came intermediately 
through a purported Indian child calling her- 
self "Laughing Water." Spontaneous allu- 
sions having been made to some trouble from 
which Doris had suffered, Dr. Hyslop asked 
what had caused it. The communicator said she 
would ask the mother. 



EVIDENCE OF RESEARCH 201 

"Accident is what she says. All right before the 
accident, all wrong after it. And some shock which 
seemed to make her afraid afterwards. 

(Yes can you tell exactly what the accident was?) 

"Fall into the river ['river' spontaneously erased 
as soon as read]. Fall is right and concussion. You 
know the rest. 

(Was any person connected with or responsible for 
the fall?) 

"Yes, Mother shakes her head and cries, but I do 
not know whether it was a man or woman, but some 
one was to blame. Carrying her to 'd' [distress and 
groans preceding the letter 'd' which was possibly the 
last letter of the word 'bed'] I do not know what 
she is trying to say but it sounds like school. 

(Who was carrying her?) 

"Man near her in relation. 

(How near?) 

"As near as father.' ' 

(All right.) 

"The mother squaw is excited now and I think it 
is a shame to make her live it all over." 

The facts were unknown even to Doris until 
this communication but were already on record 
in California, having been related to Dr. Prince 
by the personalities "Sleeping Margaret' ' and 
"Margaret." The mother was carrying the 
child, then three years old, to bed, and the 
father in a drunken frenzy seized and dashed 



202 THE FUTURE LIFE 

it violently upon the floor. From that time she 
was subject to changes of personalities and to 
deadly fear of her father. Note not only the 
truth of the statements but their psychological 
colouring, how they were extorted by " Laugh- 
ing Water ' ' piecemeal from the mother with all 
appearances of reluctance and emotion natural 
to one living over a tragic event in the life of 
her child. 

Again we must pass over much that is evi- 
dential and very little that is not identifiable 
and relevant. Other communicators now took 
most of the time. But on December 21st the 
mother gave a number of details which cannot 
be omitted. 



a I am some nervous as I recite some scenes, but I 
try to keep calm. I want to say something about 
Skippy, Skippy, a name of a, pet name. [Struggle] 

(Stick to it.) 

''Little pet of long ago. Skippy dog, and a kind of 
candy I want to speak of which we used to get at a 
store not very far off. 

(Yes what kind of candy?) 

"Long sticks that were broken in pieces, like brittle 
is sometimes. I do not mean the chocolates. They 
were rarer, but the kind that lasted so long in the 
mouth. She knows. 

(Yes she does) [Sitter had nodded] 



EVIDENCE OF RESEARCH 203 

"And there were other things we bought there 
sometimes, papers and pen for things we did at home. 
I also want to speak of a little cup that we kept 
something in metal cup, tin, small tin, that we kept 
pennies in, and we used to turn them out after we 
saved them and count them to see if we had enough 
for something which we wanted. We were great 
planners my little girl and I. And we had to save 
some for Sunday. She knows what for. 

(Can you tell) 

"Contribution, collection. Part of it for that not 
all." 

Every sentence is correct, every word, except 
that Skippy was a cat. It was lame and hence 
was given this name. The mother and child 
were accustomed to buy candy, the store was 
near the home, the candy was usually what had 
been peppermint sticks, but could be obtained 
cheaper because they had been broken. 

They bought chocolates also, but more rarely, 
because of the higher cost. These were the only 
kinds purchased. They did buy papers and 
pencils, and at the same store. The paper was 
to make the dolls with, and the pencils were in 
order to write little stories and tack them up 
for each other to find, an instance of the com- 
radeship of this mother and her unusual child. 

Note the instance of the gradual building up 
of the right conception in its passage through 



204 THE FUTURE LIFE 

the sleeping consciousness of the psychic. The 
vessel used to keep " something' ' in, "pennies" 
(now we have it), was a "little cup," a metal 
"cup," a "tin, small tin," and the communi- 
cator goes on as though satisfied. As a matter 
of fact it was a small tin can. The "some- 
thing" kept in the can was, in fact, pennies. 
Saving was a slow process because of poverty, 
and the pair would turn the pennies out to see 
if they had enough for small presents. And 
Doris constantly attended Sunday School and 
always took a penny out for the "collection." 
The mother and child were certainly great 
"planners," holding frequent consultation with 
great gravity and circumstance. 

On two occasions the name of the communi- 
cator was given by her, Emma. Though there 
was confusion of a sort which would hardly 
consist with the telepathic theory, her fixed pur- 
pose to give that name as her own is evident. 

Such, cut and injured, were the messages pur- 
porting to come from the spirit of Doris's 
mother. In full it is the most evidential group 
ever published. Some one remarked that the 
facts were mostly ordinary and common, and 
might happen to any girl and her mother. True, 
individually they might, but not in combination. 
Even naming the girl's mother, Emma, cor- 



EVIDENCE OF RESEARCH 205 

rectly had about twenty-seven chances to one 
of being incorrect if it were a guess. It is con- 
servative to say that not one family in twenty 
ever possessed a cat or dog named "Skippy." 
One chance in 560! Never having observed a 
paper doll put in a window looking out, I do 
not believe one girl in thirty has the habit of 
making and so placing them. Now we have 
one chance out of 16,800 of just these three par- 
ticulars combined being right. 

All the particulars stated about the girl in 
the communications claiming to be from her 
mother with liberal allowances for errors or 
unprovable statements would not be likely of 
duplication on this planet were its population 
a hundred fold what it is. 

Throughout the series of messages from the 
mother, no knowledge of the underlying causes 
of her daughter's former strange condition was 
manifested but only that which would be ger- 
mane to a domestic observer who was intelligent 
but unread in abnormal psychology. That is, 
they deal with puzzling conduct and the 
anxieties consequent thereto. On the theory of 
telepathic extraction from the minds of the per- 
sons present some inkling of what caused the 
conduct should have come through, since Dr. 
Hyslop of course knew perfectly the technical 



206 THE FUTURE LIFE 

definitions assigned to the phenomena of "dis- 
sociation," and even Doris at this time was 
fully informed about herself. 



ADDENDA 

But one communicator showed recognition of 
the technical nature of Doris's case, and he was 
the one known in lifetime to have had knowl- 
edge of this sort and dealings with a similar 
one. 

This was Dr. Richard Hodgson, who had 
experimented with the well-known " Beau- 
champ" instance of dissociation and had often 
conversed about it with Dr. Morton Prince, in 
whose charge it was. Early in the sitting of 
November 19th a communication from Dr. 
Hodgson was written, from which only the most 
significant scraps can be taken. 

"I am much interested in the way this case is going 
on and do not think I can add much to the work. 
(Can you compare it with any you knew?) 
4 'Yes, and have several times thought that I would 
interpolate a message that you might see that I recog- 
nized the similarity of the case with one in particular 
that caused me some concern at times and some 
hopes in others, but this is better organized than that 
was ( 8 ). I mean that there seems to be a definite 



EVIDENCE OF RESEAKCH 207 

purpose and a continuity of knowledge that the other 
case only displayed spasmodically. You will I think 
know what I mean by that. 

(Yes, can you tell me the case? I 2 ]) 

" Yes, I think so. . . . [Nothing said by Dr. 
Hyslop in the interval but "all right "] 

"I will do what I can on this side to help on this 
case for I believe it as important as any M. P. ever 
had 

(What does M. P. mean?) 

"Morton Prince 

(Good) 

"You see what I am after. 

(Exactly what I wanted) 

"The Beauchamp Case and I am trying to make 
some clear headway out of this one more than I did 
out of that." 



And later came a pointed reference to "the 
secondary self with all the multiple personal 
equations.' ' 

Another communicator attempted to give the 
real first name of the. sitter which was a very odd 
one, Brittia. As near as "Bretia" was reached, 
and then the psychic, while coming out of the 
trance, several times pronounced what phoneti- 
cally spelled would be "Britta." And in fact 
this is the way the name was always pro- 
nounced, the "i" in the spelling being silent. 



208 THE FUTURE LIFE 

Also California was named as her home, and 
the home of her foster father "Dr. Walter 
Franklin Prince" given in full, being gradually 
spelled out* Curiously, when the last name had 
partly come through it for a moment took the 
form of "P r a y." This was meaningless to 
Dr. Hyslop, who did not know that "Pray" 
was the maiden name of Dr. Prince's mother. 
After Doris returned to her western home, the 
sittings of which she was the central figure con- 
tinued, and one of the factors of the material 
became attempts to state actual events happen- 
ing to her three thousand miles away. These 
statements proved correct in remarkable meas- 
ure, as the Eeport shows along with a multitude 
of details of evidential or psychological interest. 

NOTES 

1. The Doris Case of Multiple Personality, by 
Walter Franklin Prince, Ph.D., being vols, ix-x of the 
Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical 
Research. 1419 pages. 

2. The Doris Case of Multiple Personality, by 
James H. Hyslop, Ph.D., being vol. xi of Proceed- 
ings of the American Society for Psychical Research. 
1024 pages. 

3. To some readers what has been said about the 
multiple personality will seem more incredible than 



EVIDENCE OF RESEARCH 209 

spirit communication, yet, we repeat, these are facts 
scientifically established and unquestioned. Besides 
the voluminous report, an abstract of the case was 
printed in the American Journal of Abnormal Psy- 
chology for June-July, 1916, and the case has been 
reviewed without dissent by some of the leading 
experts. 

4. As it is awkward to keep repeating ' ' purported' ' 
or " alleged' ' the reader will understand that by 
" communicator' ' we mean the same thing as though 
we said " purported communicator. " 

5. See Proceedings, X, 1042-3. 

6. Yet it is very possible that such existed. There 
were articles kept by "Margaret" in her drawer, 
which "Real Doris" was not permitted to see and did 
not know existed, or it may have been simply for- 
gotten. 

7. There were children that Doris does not remem- 
ber because "Margaret," who has vanished and whose 
memories were not transferred, always "came out" to 
play with them. 

8. Correct, in that this case was in the main 
organized into five concrete and coherent selves, not 
arising by hypnosis or undergoing various compound- 
ings in or from that state. 

9. Dr. Hyslop well knew when he asked the initial 
questions that they would be far more likely to sug- 
gest, on the guessing theory, one of the numerous 
cases dissimilar to that of Doris with which Dr. 
Hodgson's fame Is mainly identified, than Miss 



210 THE FUTURE LIFE 

"Beauchamp," whose contact with him has been made 
known only by one or two obscure references in Dr. 
Morton Prince's book. Nor was there anything which 
could have been inferred from the appearance of the 
now normal young woman sitting silently back of the 
psychic, even had the latter been awake and gazing 
at her. 



A NARRATIVE OF SPIRIT RETURN 

The clergyman who had the following experi- 
ences is one of the leaders in his orthodox and 
numerous religious denomination in the city of 
New York. As a young man he was noted for 
a vigorous intellect, big heart, and athletic mas- 
culinity. His later honours and influence are 
but the fulfilment of the promise of his youth. 

Some years ago the wife of this clergyman — a 
splendid character — passed away. On her 
deathbed her husband, whom we will call Dr. 
V., asked her if she would try to come back to 
him. She replied, "I will, if the Good Father 
will let me." 

"Eleven months had passed away, and not 
even a dream about the one whom I loved better 
than my soul. She had left me with several 
children, and at no time during that period was 
there a hint to me that she was interested in 
us at all. I had fussed over the thing, I had 



EVIDENCE OF RESEAKCH 211 

prayed over it, and I had wondered why noth- 
ing had come to me. 

" During our life we had a very extraordinary 
relation. We were exceedingly sensitive to each 
other's condition, and when she was in diffi- 
culty or ill and away from me I almost always 
knew it. I call it telepathy myself. 

' i She died in May. The following April I was 
in the city of Philadelphia, in the Bingham 
House. I went to my room about twelve o 'clock. 
There was a large chandelier with four or five 
lights in it in the center of the room and a push- 
button right at the head of the bed. I was lying 
with my eyes closed, not asleep, — as truly awake 
as ever in my life. I was thinking of her. It 
didn't seem to come suddenly, it seemed to come 
naturally, the room was filled with her presence. 
I could see, though my eyes were closed, her 
form, shadowy, with something that looked like 
the mist of the morning about it, and I said, 
1 Darling, why have you not come before ? ' 

"She answered, 'The Good Father would not 
permit me. ' 

"I said, 'I have been so lonesome and so 
heartbroken that I have hungered for you. 
Where did you come from?' 

" *I have been up to see the children. (They 
were up near Lake .) They are lovely.' 



212 THE FUTURE LIFE 

She seemed to be sitting on the edge of the bed. 
The vision was so real that I reached up and 
touched the button and made an attempt to put 
my arms about her. As the room was flooded 
with light I saw nothing and felt nothing. 1 
could have cried, 'What have I done! What 
have I done! Father, forgive me, let her 
come back. 7 That was my prayer. 

"I do not know how long I waited, praying 
earnestly and thinking intensely, when she was 
in the room again. I could see the smile on her 
face. My eyes were still closed. I never moved 
a hand or opened my eyes. I just let my soul 
do the talking. I was afraid to move and de- 
stroy it. I could see her. I have never lost the 
vision at all. I can recall it this second. She 
came in with a gentle laugh, and said, 'Why did 
you do that? Don't you know you can't see 
me T I don *t know how long we talked. I know 
I never slept a wink that night, and we talked 
of our life, of our children, of her father and 
brother that had passed on and whom she said 
she was instructing on the other side. God 
knows they needed it. She said that she was 
instructing them. That has destroyed my belief 
in hellfire. I have never preached hell since. 
And I have never feared death since. Death 
to me is only a little change, that is all. 



EVIDENCE OF RESEARCH 213 

"That was our conversation, there wasn't a 
silly thing, there wasn't a trivial thing, — 
nothing but what was of interest to her and 
me. 

"Now, here is the climax. She said, 'I have 
come to you that you may stop your grieving, 
for it is making it impossible for you to do your 
work. That must be done. ' I went back home, 
took the first train to my children, gathered 
them about me, and told them that I had seen 
and talked with their mother and that she was 
watching over us. That's had a powerful effect 
upon my children. 

' ■ Once again she came to me, but that seemed 
more like a half-waking, half-sleeping dream, 
just as satisfactory to me as the other. But not 
so vivid or evidential. 

"My little girl of twelve did not appear to me 
for a year after her passing, but she came then 
in much the same fashion as her mother on the 
second occasion. 

"During the first occasion I could hear the 
rumble of the noises on the street, but in addi- 
tion I could hear this voice in my soul, — it was 
real, like a sounding board. I could hear her 
little laugh and her voice. She was there to me 
so vividly that I felt that I could touch that 
button and grab for her. There was nothing 



214 THE FUTURE LIFE 

different about my emotional state or my need 
for her at that time." 

Dr. V. was asked what he had read or heard, 
previous to the vision, about developed spirits 
doing missionary work for less developed ones. 
His answer was quick and decided; " Never 
heard anything of the kind." He was asked if 
he believed that such things are done on the 
other side (this was before he had dictated the 
above narrative) . i ' I believe it because my wife 
said so," was the energetic response. Let it be 
noted that not only did the vision not come in 
the first paroxysm of grief but eleven months 
after the death, but that the fact announced as 
to the spirit's occupation was contrary to Dr. 
V.'s previous belief, and caused a permanent 
doctrinal alteration dating from that moment. 
If the vision was the work of the "subliminal," 
that was functioning in an odd fashion ! 

People sometimes ask, "What is the good of 
spirit communication, even if it is a fact?" 
It appears to have done good in this instance. 
By what he felt to be as absolute a demonstra- 
tion as any of the apostles received this reli- 
gious leader was able to more than recover his 
former vigour in the business of life, a powerful 
influence for good was exerted upon his chil- 
dren, and henceforth a new and tremendous 



EVIDENCE OF RESEARCH 215 

assurance pervaded his sermons relating to the 
life which is Beyond. 

The Experience of Dying 

The following experience is related by Mr. 
John Huntley in a communication to Mr. J. 
Arthur Hill, who publishes it in his book, Man 
Is a Spirit 1 : 

66 About five years ago I woke from sleep to 
find ' myself ' clean out of the body, as the kernel 
of a nut comes out of its shell. I was conscious 
in two places — in a feeble degree, in the body 
which was lying in bed on its left side ; and to 
a far greater degree, away from the body (far 
away, it seemed), surrounded by white opaque 
light, and in a state of absolute happiness and 
security (a curious expression, but one which 
best conveys the feeling). 

"The whole of my personality lay 'out 
there,' even to the replica of the body — which, 
like the body, lay also on its left side. I was 
not conscious of leaving the body, but woke 
up out of it. It was not a dream, for the con- 
sciousness was an enhanced one, as superior 
to the ordinary waking state as that is to the 
dream state. Indeed, I thought to myself, 

^p. 71-74. 



216 THE FUTUEE LIFE 

1 This cannot be a dream,' so I willed 'out 
there' (there was no volition in the body), and 
as my spirit self moved so the body moved in 
bed. 

"I did not continue this movement. I was 
far too happy to risk shortening the experi- 
ence. After lying in this healing and blessed 
light I became conscious of what, for want of 
a better term, I must call music; gentle and 
sweet it was as the tinkling of dropping water 
in a rocky pool, and it seemed to be all about 
me. I saw no figure, nor wished to; the con- 
tentment was supreme. The effect of these 
sounds was unutterably sweet, and I said to 
myself, 'This must be the Voice of God.' I 
could not endure the happiness, but lost con- 
sciousness there, and returned unconscious to 
the body, and woke next morning as though 
nothing had happened. 

" I had been passing through a period of 
mental and spiritual stress at the time, but had 
not been indulging in psychism, had never at- 
tended a seance or similar phenomenon, had 
not, as. I remember, been reading anything to 
act by way of suggestion. I am in no doubt 
whatever — so vivid was the happening — that 
had the feeble thread between soul and body 
been severed 'I' should have remained intact, 



EVIDENCE OF RESEARCH 217 

the grosser body being sloughed off for a finer 
and one fitted for a lighter and happier con- 
sciousness, for 'life more abundant,' in fact. 
• • • • • • • 

"I feel, however, I would like to make it 
known in such times as these ; and, apart from 
its scientific aspect, if it conveys any personal 
comfort the trouble is repaid indeed." 

In a later communication, Mr. Huntley states 
his general religious standpoint thus : 

"I may add that I am not a i Spiritualist, ' or 
Theosophist, or Occultist forcer of these con- 
ditions, but a member of the Society of Friends, 
and one of liberal views in matters of religious 
belief." 



CHAPTER X 

THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY 

Gibbon, in his famous fifteenth chapter, marks 
as one of the five causes of the growth of Chris- 
tianity, ' ' the doctrine of a future life, improved 
by every additional circumstance which could 
give weight and efficacy to that important 
truth;" and in the true spirit of the eighteenth 
century, he goes on to remark that "it is no 
wonder that so advantageous an offer (eternal 
happiness) should have been accepted by great 
numbers of every religion, of every rank, and 
of every province in the Eoman Empire." The 
historian is right when he thus sees in Chris- 
tianity the religion of immortality, though he 
fails to throw light on the curious phenomenon 
that a truth which, on his own admission had 
been for centuries in possession of the greater 
portion of civilized men, had proved of small 
account, yet in the new religion swept over the 
Graeco-Eoman world and eventually trans- 
formed it. Modern study of the origins of our 
faith has supplied this lack. We now know 
that the driving force behind the Christian 

218 



VALUE OF BELIEF 219 

f movement of the early centuries was the belief 
( that the Founder of the movement reappeared 
after death to various witnesses, some of whom 
put their experience on record; and this belief 
being based, not on speculation but on an appeal 
to facts, had power to dissolve the prevailing 
materialism and scepticism of the age. There 
can be no question that the most potent factor 
in the reconstruction of the old world was the 
living conviction of immortality generated by 
the post-mortem appearances of One who had 
shown Himself Lord of life and fate. And it 
may be said that the waning of belief in im- 
I mortality which synchronizes with the revival 
\ of science, may be traced in great measure to the 
^failure of belief in the Resurrection. Immor- 
tality which had been so vitally linked to the 
reality of the Besurrection-appearances must 
Buffer a severe blow when they are explained 
away as illusions of one or two hallucinated per- 
sons whose wild fancies spread as by contagion 
through a vast multitude. But what I wish to 
emphasize is that whether by illusion or reality, 
(the belief in the immortality of the soul became 
a great dynamic in the moral realm and created 
Christian civilization. 

Let us suppose that a like absolute conviction 
of a future life should seize the minds of this 



220 THE FUTURE LIFE 

generation with the overwhelming force which 
marked the early Christian civilization, what 
moral and spiritual consequences might be ex- 
pected to ensue ? We know what took place in 
the first century. This belief, brought home to 
the mind by proofs deemed infallible, acted as a 
mighty spiritual dynamic and turned common- 
place traders and slaves into heroes and 
martyrs. It is true that many, hypnotized, as 
it were, by the resplendent glory of the life be- 
yond, forgot the duties and interests of the 
world at hand ; but this scorn of earth and time 
arose not so much from belief in immortality as 
from the deep-rooted conviction that the end of 
the world was at hand, that at any moment "the 
hammer on the clock of time might rise to strike 
the last hour." Why trouble about a world 
which at any moment might take end? Why 
concern oneself about the conditions of industry 
or the responsibilities of the home when they 
exist on such a precarious tenure? But this 
"otherworldliness" has rarely except, perhaps, 
in the monastic period, been the creation of 
faith in a future life. The evangelicals and the 
puritans, against whom the charge has been 
specially levelled, were among the most success- 
ful of merchants and financiers, and took no 
small part in reforming the social abuses of 



VALUE OF BELIEF 221 

their time. But in the light of our modern 
knowledge and of our present ethical advance, 
what practical effect might a profound convic- 
tion, based not merely on faith but on the sort 
of evidence which convinced the first Christians, 
be reasonably expected to have on the thoughts 
and lives of men? This question is not of 
merely academic interest, because today an 
alleged principle or truth can find entrance only 
after passing the pragmatic test. Granted that 
death does not end all — what of it? Why not 
take one world at a time? Why be solicitous 
about a state of being which is still outside the 
range of our experience ? The present life with 
its infinitude of interests, its pressing needs, is 
enough just now. When we cross the threshold 
of the unseen, we shall meet the conditions that 
await us there and relate ourselves to them as 
best we can. So it is argued. But life is not 
a series of disconnected incidents, it is an 
organic unity, and its spiritual temperature can- 
not but be affected by its future as well as its 
past. Did an assured conviction possess the 
mind of its existence in the realm beyond death, 
such a conviction would cast back on the present 
| order a strange and wonderful illumination, 
\ reversing our most cherished opinions, and ef- 
I f ecting an astonishing transvaluation of values. 



222 THE FUTURE LIFE 

To begin with: such an indisputable assur- 
ance would justify the preference which man 
has entertained for ideals, religious, moral, 
aesthetic, as compared with the life lived on a 
level with the beasts that perish. If death 
marks the limit of man's moral history, then say 
what w r e will, matter which is indestructible 
proves its superiority to personality, which is 
evanescent. On the other hand, if the spirit 
lives on through death, then it follows that 
nature or matter is subordinate to the interests 
of the soul, and our moral horizon widens ac- 
cordingly. Our ideals triumph over death, and 
can now be pursued with enthusiasm, and to 
them our most devoted and loving service can 
be rationally given. It is true that we ought 
to live in the good, the true, and the beautiful, 
I whether we are immortal or no. This " ought " 
expresses an ineradicable instinct, and he who 
yields to it puts on beauty and nobleness. "If 
there be no God and no future state," says F. 
W. Robertson, "yet even then it is better to be 
generous than selfish, better to be chaste than 
licentious, better to be true than false, better 
to be brave than to be a coward. Thrice- 
blessed is he who — when all is drear and cheer- 
less — has obstinately clung to moral good." 

And many a heroic spirit has sacrificed his 



\r~* 



"> 






! 



VALUE OF BELIEF 223 

physical being, in these last years, at the call of 
duty though unable to find solace or strength in 
faith in God and immortality. Yet the vast 
majority will argue that since the cosmic order 
has no room for moral ideals, only a quixotic 
temper will persist in cultivating them at the 
sacrifice, it may be, of life itself. At all events, 
it will be admitted that a struggle in which we 
are foreordained to defeat is hardly one in 
which any thrilling enthusiasm can be evoked. 
Yet without this enthusiasm the highest fruits 
of the ethical life cannot be forthcoming. In a 
moral universe a theory of annihilation stands 
condemned, for it does not tend to an increase 
of goodness. 

But an equally important question is raised 
when the sociological effect of this theory is 
contemplated. Convince men generally that 
consciousness ends in the grave, deprive them 
of that optimism that lies hidden in the heart, 
however it may be derided by the tongue, and 
what right have you to expect enterprise, ad- 
venture, the courage of the pioneer, the forward 
movement of the forces that make for progress 
and civilization? It was Eenan who said that 
it would be a fatal day for any nation when it 
gave up belief in immortality. His shrewd eye 
saw that behind disbelief in a life beyond lay 



224 THE FUTURE LIFE 

disbelief in the value of personality. Look at 
Germany, where, among the educated classes, 
faith in immortality has been scorned as one of 
the main buttresses of superstition, and where 
dogmatic materialism in the person of Pro- 
fessor Haeckel still plants its banner. Is it too 
much to say that the diminishing sense of the 
worth of the individual has led to the glorifi- 
cation of the State which, in turn, casting aside 
the trammels of morality and lifted into a 
sphere where good and evil cease to have any 
meaning, provokes the stern antagonism of the 
w r orld, and calls down irremediable disaster? 

From another point of view our theme has 
importance for the social worker and the social 
theorist. Even when we have made allowance 
for all the regenerating influences at work, no 
thoughtful mind can contemplate the multitudes 
foredestined to pauperism and crime, victims of 
the fatal pressure of circumstance and heredity, 
without a feeling, that cannot be denied, that 
they have a claim on the universe for another 
chance, a fresh opportunity to win the secret of 
life. If the worker among these children of an 
evil fate were convinced that our gaols and peni- 
tentiaries were the only environment many of 
them should ever know, such knowledge would 
paralyse his energies and he must throw up his 



VALUE OF BELIEF 225 

enterprise as too small a remedy to cope with so 
tragic a wrong. Our social order, as we are 
now beginning to learn, is largely responsible 
for crime and poverty. The morally and so- 
cially unfit are our failures ; are they also con- 
sidered as unfit by the cosmic order? 

The trial of the war has provoked in many a 
heart anxious questions about the fate of dear 
ones who have been snatched away in spiritual 
immaturity, or, it may be, with many sins to 
deplore, or 

" about some act 
That has no relish of salvation in't." 

Yet these have sealed their loyalty to a noble 
cause with their blood. Now the safe guide in 
forming a sound ethical judgment where our 
own personal inclinations are involved, is to 
bring the problem into the clear light of eternal 
truth. "Greater love hath no man than this, 
that a man lay down his life for his friends.' ' 
The soldier, however unworthy in other re- 
spects, who gives his life for a cause beyond 
himself, for an ideal end, however dimly de- 
scried, is, so far, in harmony with the deepest 
laws of the moral universe. In dying for an 
unselfish purpose, he has made a momentous 
beginning in the upward calling of the spirit, 



226 THE FUTURE LIFE 

and there are boundless possibilities of moral 
progress, if there is a world beyond. That may 
be taken as one of the most certain of facts ; and 
the only alternative is annihilation for all alike ; 
saint and sinner go down to the same night of 
nothingness. 

On the other hand, if, as Emerson says, the 
main enterprise of the world is the upbuilding 
of personality, and if the world guarantees the 
permanence of its work, it follows that men will 
have the strongest reason and the highest mo- 
tive to take up and make their own the purposes 
thus written in the very nature of things. If 
the universe is on the side of the good, in spite 
of all our weaknesses and failures we can still 
press onwards with undaunted spirit. Death 
ceases to paralyse us. It becomes a mere epi- 
sode in the development of the spirit, and be- 
yond it we can achieve things impossible here, 
because we shall have transcended the barriers 
of sense, and shall have entered on a purely 
mental state of being. All things are possible 
to us once the sting of death, the fear that in 
dying we shall lapse into nothingness, is drawn, 
and the " great misgiving" is supplanted by an 
assured confidence in the order of the world. 
Such a vital conviction of an after-life would 
act as a powerful ethical stimulus, urging men 



VALUE OF BELIEF 227 

on to finer issues, arming the will to beat down 
the enemies of the higher life, whether in the 
individual or in society. If the true and the 
good are ultimately one, immortality when seen 
as a real inspiration to action would seem to 
bear the stamp of a basic fact. From another 
angle, the reflex bearing of the life hereafter 
on the life that now is may be felt with a weight 
almost too great to be borne. "Whatsoever a 
man soweth, that shall he also reap." All 
moralists, however much they differ on other 
matters, are agreed that sooner or later retribu- 
tion overtakes sin, that a good act tends to 
create more good, and the thought of Karma 
which has sunk so deep into the Oriental mind 
appears to shadow forth an undeniable truth 
that "character is permanent and indestructible 
and passes not from us, however the fashion of 
our outward life may change. ' ' Now, if there is 
an after-life, the same eternal laws must operate 
there which we find at work here, else all reason- 
ing becomes an absurdity, and our moral his- 
tory a riddle without any meaning. Let men 
generally be convinced that death ushers them 
into another world in which they shall know 
themselves as continuing a life lived here, and 
with a memory whereby to claim past thoughts 
and deeds as their own, and will not reason, con- 



228 THE FUTURE LIFE 

science, prudence, conspire to force upon them 
the seriousness of life and its issues, and to 
stimulate all their psychic energies towards the 
upbuilding of a character, the making of a soul 
set free from the detaining bondage of mean 
thoughts and base desires? The individual 
would stand forth as the architect of a life and 
destiny greater than any this world at its 
highest can bestow. "I never lose heart,' ' 
writes a great philosophical idealist in the New 
Testament; "though my outward man decays, 
my inner man is renewed day by day. For the 
seen is transient, the unseen eternal." 1 It is 
here, probably, that we are to find the secret 
of so many spiritual tragedies. Many enter on 
the higher life of self-culture and self-disci- 
pline ; but as the lure of material things makes 
its appeal, and the realm of finite interests 
seem so real as contrasted with the world of 
ideals — what a falling off is there, what a de- 
cline from beauty and grace to the sordidness 
of an egotistic morality ! With the fading away 
of an immortal perspective, life seems so brief, 
so precarious, that to sacrifice pleasure, ease, 
comfort, the joy of living at the bidding of the 
ideal, appears the veriest quixotism. And so 
the soul's high adventure ends in defeat. 

X II Corinthians iv, 17 18 (Moffatt's translation). 



VALUE OF BELIEF 229 

Why are we here? Why have we been 
flung on this planet, to battle, to struggle, and 
to die? Is it not to develop our moral mus- 
cle, to make the best of our powers, to show 
what stuff we are made of? Our earthly ex- 
istence, taken at its highest, is in itself 
a fragment, a torso, a poor, and petty thing. 
As Stevenson says, "Whatever else we were 
made for, it was not for success. " Yet, deep- 
rooted and ineradicable in the heart of every 
man is, however obscured at times, a crav- 
ing for the fulfilment of his life, for its mean- 
ing to be made clear. Death seems to be 
the sheer denial of this human demand. It 
stands inexorably on the path of moral prog- 
ress : such is its outward guise. We need the 
inspiration of a great idea that we may over- 
come this abiding discouragement, and play well 
our part in the cosmic conflict between right and 
ill. ' ' Give me a great thought, ' ' said the dying 
Herder, ' ' wherewith I may quicken myself. ' ' It 
is the "great thought'' of immortality that has 
power to uplift, unify, and strengthen the moral 
energies amid the most poignant stresses to 
which flesh and blood can be exposed. Take an 
illustration from a private letter written by a 
young officer w T ho had been wounded in one of 
the bloodiest battles of the war. ' ' The regiment 



230 THE FUTURE LIFE 

had a terrible night, was only about one-third 
the strength it went in. Two of our officers 
went off their heads and about two-thirds were 
killed or wounded. There is only one thing that 
can possibly make one rise above these sur- 
roundings : faith that the spirit goes to a higher 
life, and though I'm afraid my religion has been 
and still is patchy, this thought kept me per- 
fectly calm and steady. Before the thing 
started you certainly could have knocked me 
down with a feather. I'm afraid I shall be 
frightened, too, when it has to be done again; 
but if only I can get into the same frame of 
mind as before, I shall be quite contented." 

In the broader battlefield of the world, where 
we are all called to be soldiers, the same thought 
has power to revivify the fainting spirit, and 
when it infects the modern consciousness with 
its triumphant energy, it will lift our personal 
lives to fresh levels of efficiency, strength, and 
freedom. 

Here, then, is one of the great tasks to which 
the New Age summons our finest and most con- 
secrated minds. It is the reenthronement of a 
passionate faith in immortality, in the hearts 
and lives of men. What this faith did for the 
old Graeco-Eoman civilization it can do for ours. 
It overthrew the very foundations, moral, social, 



VALUE OF BELIEF 231 

and political, of that "hard Koman world,' ' de- 
stroyed its materialism, transformed its most 
highly prized values, and crowned the individual 
with a glory which has issued in the democratic 
ideals of today. Our civilization has been 
largely pagan in character, built on sensuous 
and materialistic ends and aims. The cry of 
the hour is for reconstruction and renewal, but 
as Lord Morley remarks in another connection, 
no real or permanent betterment in the social 
order is possible apart from a transformation 
of spiritual thought. The reconstruction of so- 
ciety, the reform or abolition of time-honoured 
institutions are vain dreams, if the individual 
remains a materialist at heart, conceiving this 
world as a " planetary cage" to be enjoyed as | 
one may, but with no outlook upon a grander 
universe, no glimpse of a transcendental realm 
where may be found the fruition of all his 
highest hopes and strivings. Eeinvest per- 
sonality with its native rights, place it in a 
category by itself as an end to which all else 
is a means, that for which all institutions and 
forms exist and apart from which they have no 
reality, conceive it to be "a something that 
pertains not to this wild death-element of Time, 
that triumphs over Time, and is, and will be, 
when Time shall be no more;" and you have 



232 THE FUTURE LIFE 

introduced a revolutionary factor of potency, in 
Biblical phrase, to remove mountains — moun- 
tains of sloth, inertia, prejudice, and the dulness 
of use and wont. 

From another but no less important point 
of view belief in immortality has a social 
value which, perhaps, will make it more toler- 
able to the mind of the diplomatist and politi- 
cal leader. Today great tracts of the world 
are in darkest chaos and anarchy. As was 
predicted long ago by thoughtful observers, 
the proletariat have taken up arms and are 
threatening the very existence of the civilization 
for the salvation of which the great war has 
been waged. Men of the depressed classes find- 
ing themselves and their fellows the victims of 
age-long inequality, suffering, and injustice, not 
infrequently under the aegis of law and religion, 
are determined to make a clean sweep of the 
system in which such things are possible. 
They boldly announced that after the war of 
nations, there must be another and a still more 
terrible war — the war of classes. Deep-seated 
in their hearts are love and hate, love of human- 
ity in the abstract, hate of human beings or 
certain classes of human beings in the concrete. 
Just because of their love of humanity, the Bol- 
sheviki and others at one with them, though 



VALUE OF BELIEF 233 

bearing a different name, are guilty of murder, 
robbery, and many another crime, and have let 
loose the most violent and brutal of man's 
primitive passions. Why this frightful contra- 
diction? At bottom the answer will be found to 
be that great masses of the toilers have aban- 
doned belief in any other world than this ; they 
ask for no Heaven and they fear no Hell. What 
they demand and what they must have is a 
share of the good things of the only life they 
know or care about or in which they believe. 
Hence their cries, "Down with the State, with 
the comfortable and well-to-do classes, with the 
intellectuals, and up with the unprivileged and 
the have-nots ! Time is passing, death will soon 
end all. Let us destroy, then, with fire and 
sword the existing order in the hope that at 
once the poor and the suffering may enjoy the 
good things of the world. ' ' Such thoughts could 
only be bred in an atmosphere saturated with 
materialism. Are we, then, to proclaim a tame 
acquiescence in the wrongs and injustices which 
organized greed inflicts on the workers, and as 
a substitute for good-will and social righteous- 
ness set up the hopes of a good time coming in 
the world beyond? On the contrary, belief in 
the infinite worth of the human soul, especially 
- when reinforced by the doctrines of the father- 



234 THE FUTURE LIFE 

hood of God and the brotherhood of man, 
powerful as they are to dissolve and to build 
up again the whole social structure, creates the 
spiritual passion that can brook no wrong done 
to the humblest creature that wears a human 
face. But this passion is patient. It knows that 
self-sacrifice and self-control are essential to a 
being whose future is not limited by the grave, 
but whose destiny is made or marred by the 
thoughts or exertions of his earthly life. It 
knows that there is another and a better world, 
and that there the only thing that counts is 
character, love, and goodness, a spirit that can 
say: "Better far to suffer wrong than to in- 
flict wrong on any man." The most urgent 
need at the present time in the interests of the 
I spiritual reconstruction of the world is to re- 
entrench this dynamic faith in the hearts and 
lives of men. Workers in this mighty trans- 
formation are called from different quarters. 
The philosopher whose proud boast it once was 
that though he could bake no bread he could 
give us God, freedom, and immortality, may 
again bring his interest into relation to ordinary 
human need by showing the place of a future 
life in any rational concept of the universe ; the 
psychic researcher with his love of truth, his re- 
morselessly scientific attitude, will do w r ell to con- 



VALUE OF BELIEF 235 

centrate his energies on establishing the fact of 
survival ; the Biblical scholar should make plain 
the solid historical foundations of the Easter- 
message on which organized Christianity was 
founded; the ethical teacher can show that 
moral experience stultifies itself unless the pos- 
tulate of immortality be granted ; the preacher 
can vindicate and intensify the deep mystical 
craving, manifest in all the higher religions, of 
union with the Divine, of emancipation from the 
weakness and decay of nature into the life and 
gladness of the sons of God. "With such con- 
certed and unified effort there shall dawn upon 
our distracted world a new day wherein at last 
the idealism of Christ shall have free course to 
work its beneficent will, to realize the dream of 
seer and prophet, the spiritualizing of all human 
I relations in the veritable establishment of 
God's Kingdom on earth. 



INDEX 



Adler, Felix, 47 

Agnosticism and immutabil- 
ity, 26 

American Psychical Research 
Society, 36 

American soldier, testimony 
of an, 61 

Annihilation, moral conse- 
quences of theory of, 223 
sociological effect of, 224 

Appearances of Christ, post- 
mortem, 125, 219 

Aristotle, 25, 168 

Armstrong, Professor, 166 

Augustine, St., 38 

B 

Bailey, "Festus" of, 11 

Balfour, A. J., 30, 146 

Balfour, G. W„ 33, 167 

Barnes' " Evidences of Chris- 
tianity," 149 

Barrett, Sir W. F., 33, 144, 
146 

" Beauchamp," the, case of, 
206, 209, 210 

Bergson, H., 146 

Bolsheviki, unbelief of the, 
232, 233 

Bossuet, 89 

Boyd-Carpenter, Bishop, 33 

Browning, R., 46 

Buddha, 40 

Buddhism, 43 

Butcher, H. S., Prof., 167 

237 



Carlyle, Thomas, 133 
Cameron, Miss, 175 
Character, significance of, 9, 10 
" Chenoweth," Mrs., 181, 183 
Clement of Alexandria, 64 
Clergyman's experience, a, 

210-215 
Clodd, Edward, 27, 28, 142, 

160 
Coe, Professor, 92 
Coleridge, S. T., 144 
Conversion, 18 
Crawford, Professor, 35 
Crookes, William, 30, 32 
Cross-correspondence, 172, 173, 

176, 177, 178 

D 
Dante, 63 

Darwin, Charles, 67, 144, 149 
Dead, the, employments of, 

156, 214 
Death, fear of, 21, 22 

meaning of, 62 

sting of, 226 
Democritus, 66 
Dickinson, G. Lowes, 45 
" Dionysius, Ear of," 167 
Doyle, Sir A. C, 146 
Dual personality, 180 
Dying, experience of, 215-217 

E 

Eliot, George, 5, 6 
gmerson, R. W., 22, 49, 94, 
99, 226 



238 



INDEX 



Emotions anl immortality, 40 
Empedocles, 66 
Eternal life, 11 
Ether, 37 



Hyslop, James H , 30 

on the Sermon on the 

Mount, 101 
confession of, 148 
and the Doris case, 183 



Fechner, Gustav, 129, 138 
Fisher, Doris, strange case of, 

179-210 
Fiske, John, 75 
Flammarion, Camille, 30, 35 
Future life, influence of, on 

the present, 221 



G 



Gibbon, 218 
Gladstone, W. E., 32 
Goethe, 7, 49, 80 



Haeckel, Professor, 27, 28, 73, 
224 

dogmatism of, 29 

monism of, 68 
Hall, G. Stanley, 111, 112 
Harnack, Professor, 102 
Haynes, E. S. P., 78 
Heaven, 59 
Herder, 229 
Hill, J. A., quotation from, 

215-217 
Hodgson, Richard, 155, 163, 

164, 206, 207 
Holland, Mrs., 172 
Holt, Henry, 157 
Homer, 131 
Hugo, Victor, 22 
Huntley, John, experience of, 

215-217 
Huxley, T. H., 8, 24, 25 



Ideals, moral, 83, 222 
Immortality, meaning of the 
term, 1, 2 
racial, 5, 6, 7 
and the Churches, 14 
conventional ideas of, 17 
belief in and spiritual re- 
newal, 19, 20 
difficulties of belief in, 20 
desire for, Chap. Ill (pas- 
sim ) 
belief in and suicide, 42 
and religion, 58 
and morality, 86 
and the affections, 91 
and philosophy, 136, 234 
as a spiritual dynamic, 

220 
and the war, 225 
and civilization, 231, 234 



James, William, 30, 31, 33, 

69, 74, 146, 163 
Jefferson, C. E., 39 
Jesus Christ: 

teaching of, Chap. VI 

(passim) 
the Resurrection of, mean- 
ing of, 122 
influence of, 132, 133 
contribution of, to belief in 
immortality, 138 
John, St., 11, 12 
Johnson, Samuel, 61 
Jowett, Benjamin, 107 



INDEX 



239 



K 

Kant, Immanuel, 8, 83, 150 

Karma, 227 

Kingdom of God, Christ's idea 

of, 102, 103 
Kingsley, Charles, 24 
Kropotkin, Prince, 97 



Lang, Andrew, 33 

Leuba, Prof. J. H., 41, 69, 70, 

71 
Lisle, Leconte de, 41 
Lodge, Sir Oliver J., 144 
on the nature of the soul, 4 
personal confession of, 16 
advocate of psychic re- 
search, 30, 32 
cross-correspondence test 
of, 172 
Love, not transferable, 92 
Lucretius, 66 

M 

MacDougall, W., 161 

Man, the greatness of, 82 
ideal-forming power of, 87 
higher than nature, 88 
citizen of an eternal world, 
88 

Materialism, 66 

ambiguity of the term, 71 
argument of, 151 

Martin, A. W., 67, 127 

Martineau, James, 112 

Marx, Karl, 79 

McCabe, Joseph, 28 

McGiffert, A. C, 18 

Mediums, 33, 36, 142 

Metchnikoff, E., 27, 28 

Miracle, meaning of, 38 

Morley, Viscount, 231 

Multiple personality, 180 



Miinsterberg, Hugo, 141 
Myers, F. W. H., 30, 32, 129, 
148, 159, 164 



N 

Narrative of spirit return, 

210-213 
Notes on the Doris Case, 208, 

209 

O 

Officer, letter of, quoted, 229, 

230 
Origen, 64 



Pascal, 23 

Paul, St., 17, 90, 123, 133, 173, 
174, 228 

" Pelham, George," 155, 157 

Personality, 63, 226, 231 

Pessimism, 40 

Peter, St., 112 

Phenomena, physical, of spir- 
itism, 34 

Philoxenus, 169 

Piper, Mrs., 155, 163, 166, 172 

Plato, 49, 64, 107, 131 

Prince, Morton, 206, 210 

Prince, W. F., 181, 182 

Pringle-Pattison, Professor, 
76, 96 

Pulpit, the modern, weakness 
of, 114 

Psychical Research Society, 
32, 140 

Purgatory, 64 



Rashdall, Hastings, 143 
Reconstruction, spiritual, 234 
Resurrection of Christ, Chap. 
VII (passim) 



240 



INDEX 



Rich Man and Lazarus, Para- 
ble of the, 111 
Richet, Charles, 30 
Robertson, F. W., 222 
Royce, Josiah, 6, 7 
Ruskin, John, 17, 32 

S 

Sadducees, the, Christ and, 

104 
Schleiermacher, 43, 44 
Schrenck-Notzing, von, 35 
Sensationalism, 72 
Service, Rev. R., 156 
Shakespeare, 42 
Shaw, G. Bernard, 41, 44, 45 
Sidgwick, Henry, 30, 53 
Sidgwick, Mrs. Henry, 161 
Socialism, influence of, 78 
Soul, definitions of, 2, 3, 4 
Spiritistic hypothesis, advan- 
tages of, 162, 163 
weakness of, 163, 164 
Stevenson, R. L., 229 
Stirling, J. H., 96 
Streeter, B. H„ 60 
Swedenborg, 150 



Taylor, Prof. A. E., 141 



Telepathy, 159, 160, 161, 162 
Tennant, F. R., 68 
Tennyson, Lord, 46, 86 
Theologia Germ<mica t 122 
Theology and psychic re- 
search, 142, 143 
Thompson, Francis, 10 
Triviality of alleged messages 
from the dead, 153, 154, 
164, 165 
Tyndall, John, 66 



" V," Dr., 210 
Values, moral, 75 
Verrall, Miss, 172, 173 
Verrall, Mrs. A. E., 172 
Verrall, Prof. A. E., 167 
Virgil, 131 

W 

War, the Great, and immor- 
tality, 7, 13, 14, 89, 225 
Ward, James, 64, 76 
Watson, William, 9, 51 
Wells, H. G., 41, 45, 51 
Willett, Mrs., 168 
Woman, a mysterious, the 
mystical saying of, 115 



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